


Many Happy Returns of the Day

by Werelibrarian



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:20:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 38,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21798253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Werelibrarian/pseuds/Werelibrarian
Summary: Tumblr birthday fics written in 2019.Each chapter specifies pairing. Ratings vary but explicit fics have been marked.
Relationships: Elektra Natchios/Karen Page, Frank Castle/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Luke Cage/Jessica Jones/Danny Rand, Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios, Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson/Marci Stahl
Comments: 35
Kudos: 112





	1. Matt/Foggy/Marci. To the winner of the debate goes the spoils

The first time Matt and Marci stood up on opposite sides of a moot courtroom, Foggy realized that, before the graduation caps went airborne, one of them was going to have been inside the other one. It was in the way Marci’s steel-trap arguments made Matt grind his teeth, and it was in the way Matt's arcane but perfect historical precedents made Marci scribble on her legal pad so furiously she’d crack pens.

Foggy wasn’t going into law just because he wanted to protect the innocent or because he was competitive. He wanted to make enough to give his parents an easy retirement, and he wanted to do some good along the way. In that order. It wasn’t like he was bad at law or like he was coasting through school, though. No way, he was killing the beast one exam at a time, just like everyone else here. He just wasn’t the kind of law student who’d take it real personal when they got their asses handed to them.

Which, it turned out, Matt and Marci both were. 

Big surprise there. But what actually _was_ a surprise was that when they went at each other hammer and tongs, it made Foggy feel like his heart was a baking-soda volcano and his underwear was made of apple pie. And as he sat at the back of the courtroom, cross-legged and quietly erect, he imagined the only thing better than watching two hyper-competitive, hyper-attractive people give each other the tongue-lashing of their lives was if they would just agree to do it in their underwear.

“You live with the guy, there’s gotta be a way I can take him out,” Marci said, slamming down shot glass number four and picking up number five.

Foggy, on shot number three, could hardly keep from giggling. “Take him out like sniper or take him out like date?”

Marci growled and threw her arm out. “Bartender! Another!”

“The lady’s drinks are on me,” a smooth voice called. Foggy whipped his head around and took in Matt standing in the sunset’s warm light, glowing smugly like he was being rimmed by a dozen angels. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Bring the bottle,” Marci snapped, without turning around and without missing a beat. Matt winced. Four fingers of Jack Daniels later, when Foggy blearily lifted his head and found the bar devoid of fuckable, snarky, totally hot-for-each-other law students, he just sighed and paid the tab. Matt and Marci must have argued so much while Foggy drowsed that they got fed up and went home.

A loud thump from the bathroom in the back made Foggy fumble his dismount from the barstool, and then, through the paper-thin New York walls, there was a whispered “Shhhh!” that made the old guys at the bar snort into their beers. Foggy shook his head and shared a rueful smile with them. At least someone was getting some.

The next moot, Marci won, and Matt wasn’t talking to Foggy because of all the (distracting, according to him) snickering he’d done from his seat in the audience.

“How could you possibly have heard that?” Foggy demanded.

The bathroom door burst open. “What up, losers,” Marci said, a swagger in her voice and her hips.

“You can’t be in here,” Matt’s voice bounced angrily around the tiled room from his sulking pen in one of the bathroom stalls.

“Why, is this the losers’ bathroom?” She hopped up on the counter and winked at Foggy, whose knees wavered like they wanted to buckle bring his mouth down to the level of her thighs. “Come on out, Matt.”

“No.”

“Uh, Matt.” Foggy couldn’t take his eyes off Marci. Probably wouldn’t look at anything else in his life besides her, because her high-heels were swinging and her eyes were determined and hot, and she was toying with that one button on her blouse that made the difference between “lawyer” and “a stripper’s lawyer costume,” so he reached back and vaguely scraped his knuckles against the stall door. “You should probably get out here.”

Matt edged out of the stall with his eyebrows tipped down suspiciously in the middle, like he could smell that Marci was planning something. “What do you want?”

Marci’s smile flashed her sharp canines and uncrossed her legs. “I’ve got a consolation prize for you.”

Matt, inexplicably, went pink. “With Foggy here?”

“What the hell does that mean, with Foggy here—O _h my god!_ You two’ve boned!”

“Technically, we haven’t,” Marci sniffed, “because someone’s an altar-boy who’s too good to fuck in a bar bathroom.”

“You said winner’s choice,” Matt said, now too puffed-up and offended to be embarrassed. “You can’t get mad with what I picked.”

There was a long silence as Matt visibly prayed Foggy wouldn’t ask the question. Foggy wasn’t in the business of answering prayers. “What…did you pick?”

“You wanna tell him, honey?” Marci said sweetly. Matt’s face blazed.

“Not really,” Matt mumbled, shoulders up around his ears.

Marci looped her arm around Foggy’s neck and pulled him in, and kissed him noisily. “You want me to show him?” The way she drew out the word show made it clear that he’d need a wet washcloth after.

“Oh my god,” Foggy said faintly. Her hands were in his hair and his were braced against her waist. She was warm and girl-shaped and tasted of lipstick and Matt was still here, what the hell, but that made it even better.

“You are so greedy,” Matt said slowly, but he was beginning to grin.

“Hey, I would have been happy just watching,” Foggy protested, as Matt pressed their lips together. “Watching, taking notes, assigning scores…”

“I’d win,” both of them said at the same moment. “No, _I’d_ win.”

“Guys, it’s not about winning—”

“First one to get him to come wins,” Marci said, narrow-eyed.

“No wait, that’s not how it works for guys—” Foggy interrupted.

Matt smirked and jerked Foggy’s underwear to his knees. “You’re on.”


	2. Matt/Foggy, Jessica/Luke. Defenders' babies playdate

Dani Cage-Jones’ little sister is named Lucy, and her little brother is named Jack. Only they live in different apartments, have different last names, and have different parents than her.

Lucy’s mom is a superhero—she has a shield and catches bad guys and has a metal arm that can punch through walls. She’s like Captain America and the Winter Soldier all rolled together into one and she's cooler than both. Lucy’s dad owns some kind of company. Lucy’s last name is Knight-Rand, and when Dani and her grow up they’re going to take over Dani’s mama’s business and be private eyeballs.

Jack is a Nelson-Murdock and he has two dads. That’s not weird, no matter what anyone at school said at her family tree presentation. Some kids have one parent, some have three, some have one mom and one dad, some have two dads. And anyway, Dani’s cousin Paola has two moms. (Also Paola has the best superheroing last name. Temple-Wing. Out of all of Dani’s family, Paola's probably going to be the one who ends up with powers, and she can’t even hold her own head up yet)

Anyway. Jack’s two dads. Uncle Foggy’s her favourite. He calls Dani his little Donut and throws her in the air when her parents aren’t looking. Mama says that she’s probably strong enough to throw Dani into space and that Dani _should_ prefer her own mother, but she’ll use her fake-angry voice and Uncle Foggy usually just laughs. Uncle Matt is okay, but he loves Jack more than he loves her. Dani guesses this is normal, since Jack is Uncle Matt’s own son and all, but he doesn’t always let Dani play with Jack and he’s always tell her to be careful, like she’s going to hurt Jack somehow. She’d never hurt him. She’s his big sister.

Dad said that Jack would be here to play at two o'clock. Dani looked at the clock and looked and looked and she’s pretty sure that one of those red numbers is a two, so she’s waiting by the door.

“What are you doing, baby?” Dad says. His arms are crossed but he’s laughing a little.

“Shh!” Dani presses her ear harder against the door and scrunches up her eyes so that she can hear it the second Jack comes into the building. She can hear someone flushing a toilet, and she can hear a car honk. And if she concentrates really hard, she can definitely hear Mr. Miodownik singing to his ferns, one floor down. When she opens her eyes, dad’s crouched down and listening too. "I can hear everything,“ she whispers, wide-eyed. "I’ve got powers. I’m Daredevil.”

“You are?” he whispers back. She nods. “Okay, we’ll ask where Uncle Matt got his mask.”

Suddenly, the whole door explodes with noise and shakes and Dani throws herself into her dad’s arms with a squeak. When her dad opens it, Uncle Matt is there, his fist still raised to knock. “I’ll take her for a suit fitting with Melvin next weekend,” he chuckles.

Uncle Foggy looks up with a confused expression. He’s been looking down, talking into the baby carrier that Jack lives in, and little tiny arms are reaching out of the funny cloth bag, waving a stuffed dragon. “Do I want to know?”

“Probably not,” Dani’s dad says, bumping fists with Uncle Foggy.

Dani rubs her ear—the knock had nearly deafened her, but Uncle Matt and Uncle Foggy were right behind the door and she didn’t even hear them. “I’m not Daredevil,” she admits to Uncle Matt sadly.

“That’s okay, I have a shirt for that too.” He ruffles her hair and goes off to make fun of Dani’s mama, who’s been swearing at a burned coffee cake since before lunch.

“Are you going to take care of Jack today, Donut?” Uncle Foggy asks, unstrapping the baby carrier and setting Jack down in the middle of the blanket Dani set up on the living room floor just for him. Jack’s big round lollipop head twists back and forth like he can’t figure out where Uncle Foggy’s voice is coming from but when his eyes land on Dani, his eyes light up and he starts crawling.

“Baby baby baby Jack,” Dani squeals as Jack unsteadily puts two chubby hands and then two knees in her lap and flops against her shoulder with a gummy smile. “Hi Jack.”

“Have fun, you two.”

All the adults say that Jack takes after Uncle Matt. He’s got the same colour eyes, and dark hair that looks it’s been combed upwards with a fork. But just like Uncle Foggy, Jack’s cheek looks like a scoop of ice-cream, milky sweet and soft. She kisses it. Jack grins, and that’s Uncle Foggy’s smile too.

She kisses his face again, sucking a smacking sound that makes Jack blink in surprise and then throw his head back and laugh. His cheek goes from ice-cream smooth to pink and round like an apple, and Dani nibbles gently on Jack’s springy, smiling face with her lips.

“Danielle,” Mama snaps. It’s her not-really-angry-but-listen-to-me-anyway voice.

Both Dani and Jack freeze. “Yesh?”

“Don’t put the baby in your mouth,” she orders. Dad starts to snort laughing. “You don’t know where he’s been.”

“Hey, my child is clean,” Uncle Matt says. Uncle Foggy coughs into his coffee. “-Ish.”

The adults drink their coffee and hide bits of mama’s cake in their pockets and put Uncle Danny on speakerphone and laugh and laugh. And when Jack starts to nod his head and falls asleep against her shoulder and drools all the way down her shirt, Dani holds him tight and doesn’t let him fall.

She’s not Daredevil, but she’s super enough to do that.


	3. Matt/Foggy. First kiss post season 3

Matt wraps his arms tighter around himself, trying to will away the trembling in his shoulders and the numbness in his fingers. Doing the kind of work he does, leading the kind of life he leads—there have been lots of moments where he thought, “well, I guess this is it. I did my best, and I wish it wasn’t the end, but this is how I die.” This one, though, he can’t see a way out of this one. Matt blows into his hands, presses his forehead to the icy surface of his prison, and despairs.

A metallic “ca-shunk” of a hatch opening and a hiss of escaping cold startles him into raising his head.

Bags of coleslaw hit the floor with a plap. “Oh! Matt, sweetheart,” Anna Nelson says, voice exasperated and her hands on her hips. “What are you doing in the freezer?”

\---

The joke goes around Hell’s Kitchen: At Nelson’s Meats, come for the meatball sub, stay for the legal advice.

They take over one of the back-rooms, the one they really only ever used for parties (and trying to get elected as District Attorney). Some scrounged desks, Matt’s set of filing cabinets, some written-off phones and things Foggy charmed off the IT department at Chao and Benowitz (all it took was a round of Smashburgers and gratitude he didn’t even have to fake; wow those folks are under-appreciated), bookshelves from Karen’s apartment, and a couple of chairs on loan from Marci, and Nelson and Murdock and Page comes to life.

“Who wants to make the joke about getting three-way married?” Foggy says, pouring cheap, cat-piss-dry champagne into plastic cups when they finish arranging furniture and plugging in their computers.

“Not it,” Matt laughs, his mouth puckering and eyes watering.

“I’m not marrying either of you,” Karen says, sipping from the cup and making appalled noises before going back for more. “Are we poor again already? Can’t we afford something nicer?”

“You guys,” Foggy says, topping them up. “I wanted to be true to our getting-paid-in-pie roots. You, me, him,” he claps Matt on the shoulder, “a terrible office, no money, good cases, intrigue, vigilantes, super-villains, near-death experiences, but from now on, no more secrets. Cheers and I love you.”

“Here here,” Matt says, raising his plastic cup and hoping his glasses hide the mistiness in his eyes.

One morning, Matt arrives at the deli in a daze. It’s _so_ early, and he was out _so_ late getting punched in the name of justice, and when he shoulders open the door, the jangling bell lances pain into his head. He squeezes his eyes shut. It is not going to be a good day.

“Morning!” Foggy sings, standing at the espresso machine. He’s making all sorts of horrendous hissing sounds and all sorts of beautiful smells.

“Nrrrr,” Matt replies, making a nest out of his arms and going facedown on the deli-case.

“Hoo boy, one black Americano coming right up,” Foggy says, and Matt takes that as permission to have a little nap until Foggy puts a mug down next to his head. When Matt can only flail towards it weakly, Foggy grabs his hand and leads fingers to handle with a sad tutting sound. Matt manages to wrap his upper lip over the rim of the mug and slosh a bit of the contents down his throat.

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” Matt gasps, and sculls the entire mug. The burn only makes the hot bittersweet taste better. He might have to steal Foggy’s license again so he has to stop practicing law and become a barista. Matt’s private barista.

“Hey Mikey, I think he likes it,” Foggy chuckles. “More?”

Matt nods. This time, there’s some hot foamed milk involved, and cinnamon on top, and as Matt drinks deep he sort of collapses sideways into Foggy, who puts and arm around him, steadying.

By the bottom of the second mug, Matt feels alive enough to cough his voice back into being and tell Foggy that he’s Matt’s favourite person.

“Careful you don’t kiss me in your excitement,” Foggy says indulgently. Matt huffs a tiny laugh and then he does just that.

\---

Anna literally drags Matt out of the freezer by the collar, and yells for Foggy to make his idiotic partner a hot drink while she finds him a blanket.

“I can’t believe you hid,” Foggy snaps, turning the espresso machine’s dials violently. “Man without fear, my shapely ass.”

Matt, bundled up in a fleece throw that smells like Foggy’s teenage bed, pushes a fold of it up over his mouth and nose so he doesn’t have to say anything in response.

Look, ok, in Matt’s defence, he was a mess. The very centre of his brain was a gordian knot of sleep deprivation, and everything was a confusing swirl of smells and warmth and Foggy’s arm around his waist, and in all fairness, he probably had a concussion coming on. That’s the only reason he did it.

\---

The sweet touch of Foggy’s lips against his makes the hot coffee he’s just drunk feel as cold and astringent and un-lovely as a vinegar shower. Foggy’s luscious against him, tasting of coffee himself—coffee and chocolate babka—and when he inhales and starts to pull away Matt can only whine and keep him close with a mug-warm hand on his jaw.

At some point, Matt’s going to need air, but Foggy’s tilting his head, letting him in, and Matt’s okay with eventual death as long as he gets to keep kissing Foggy until then.

“You taste of coffee,” Foggy says, and his voice is almost dreamy.

That makes Matt rear back, his brain bursting with old-fashioned ticker-tape covered in nothing but exclamation marks.

“Oh my god,” Matt breathes. “Foggy, I didn’t mean to—” he stops. That’s Foggy’s cue to make a joke, or to reassure him, or say something that makes everything all better.

Foggy says nothing. He says nothing, so Matt has to: “Foggy, I made a mistake.“

\---

"I wasn’t hiding,” Matt snapped back, wrapping his hands around the americano Foggy’s just shoved at him. “I just needed a second alone.”

“You were in there for an hour!” Foggy’s angrily cleaning the steam wand now, making puffing hisses go off at erratic intervals.

“You wouldn’t talk to me!”

Foggy’s quiet, disgusted “ugh” lets Matt know he’s rolling his eyes.

Matt rubs his face. “Foggy, look. If I could take it back, I would.”

The silence goes even stonier. “It’s like you don’t know me at all,” Foggy says, quietly condemning. “I guess I was stupid to hope you didn’t hate it.”

“Dammit, of course I hated it—I made a mistake!”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

“I kissed you by complete accident! I didn't even know I was doing it.” Matt bursts out, then slumps into his chair. “Who does that?” Foggy’s heartbeat ticks up, but Matt’s not sure why. “It should have been nicer than that. Smoother. More romantic. I had a plan. And I ruined it.”

“You had a good plan? Or a Matt Murdock plan?” Foggy says drily. Matt grumbles a “that’s fair” noise. “Your plans are for shit and you’re not allowed to make them. We agreed on this when you came back from the dead. Now stand up.”

Matt stands warily. Were they gonna fight? Foggy squares up, arms crossed belligerently in front of his chest.

“Look, I said I’m sorry—” Matt starts, spreading his arms. Foggy just chuckles indulgently and then his soft hands are gentle on Matt’s neck, pulling him in, and if Matt thought it was nice just to have his lips on Foggy, being kissed _by_ Foggy is—glorious.

“Oh my god,” Matt says again, when they break apart.

Foggy kisses his nose and wraps him up in a tight, comforting hug. “That was a Foggy Nelson plan. Smooth enough for you?”

Matt puts his head down on Foggy’s shoulder. “Okay. You get to make the plans.”


	4. Matt/Foggy. The Defenders set them up on a blind date.

“Listen,” Luke rumbles, catching one of the goons Matt has just sent flying with a head-butt. “I think he’d be the perfect guy for you.” He lays the unconscious goon down gently with all the other ones and picks off one of the guys coming at Matt’s six with a chain whip.

“I'm in the middle of something,” Matt grits out, ducking a punch and returning it double, sending the guy right into Luke’s path.

Luke pile-drives the guy into the ground. “Alright, alright.”

After the fight, Luke gets them Shake Shack, which Matt guesses is some kind of apology, and they eat sitting on the edge of a twelfth-floor fire escape, with their legs shoved through the railings.

“I bought you food, you gotta listen to me now,” Luke pronounces, wiping sauce off his chin, and starts back in on this guy, who sounds…really nice actually. Luke says his name is John, but he says it with a little wince which tells Matt it’s a lie.

“Uh, huh,” Matt says, mouth full of food. “Tell me more.” He doesn’t want to hear more about John, how strong and kind and funny he is. Okay, Matt’s a little interested, but mostly he wants Luke distracted because Danny’s climbing hand over hand down the fire escape, Spiderman style. 

“…he’s just a good guy, you know—DANIEL!” Luke jumps as Danny drops the last two feet, his hand plunging into Luke’s take out bag and coming out with Luke’s frozen custard, silent but for a swish of paper.

“Did you have a good night?” Danny says, slurping.

“It was fine,” Matt says, holding his bag over his head. Above him, Jessica Jones goes, “ooh,” and takes his entire container of french fries.

Danny hangs upside down by his knees. “Did you tell him about—”

“Was in the middle of it, yeah,” Luke says, as Danny and Jessica bookend them on the fire escape.

“Are you all in on this?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re sad,” Danny says.

“I am not—”

“And you keep breaking people’s arms about it,” Jessica says around a mouthful of fried potato.

“I do _not_!”

“We love you and we want you to be happy.” Danny says. Slowly, Jessica and Luke’s heads swivel to see how Matt’s taking such a blatant show of affection. It’s the first time in a long time someone’s said they love him, and apparently it shows on his face.

“I’m fine,” Matt insists, after an awkward silence. “I’ve got you, haven’t I?”

\---

Two weeks later, in a haze of bloodlust and righteous anger—who the fuck cuts cocaine with arsenic, do you want repeat customers or don’t you?—Matt actually does break a drug-dealer’s arm over his knee.

He can feel the other Defenders staring at him.

“If John’s so sweet,” he snaps, “are you sure you want him dating a guy like me?”

“You know what,” Jessica says, after a beat, “that’s a really good question.”

Matt grits his teeth. She’s agreeing with him. Why does it make him feel worse?

\---

Jessica takes him out drinking. Well, they’re on his sofa, so really, she brings the drinking to him.

“Luke’s not subtle,” she says, breaking a companionable silence, “but this guy? John? He’s not bad.”

“I’m sure he’s great. But I’m fine.”

“You aren’t.”

Matt waves it away. “A boyfriend won’t fix anything. I’ve done that. I’ve had people close to me. It didn’t end well.” Jessica doesn’t seem to have an answer to that. Matt’s heard bits and pieces, but he knows about the ex-best friend. The ex-assistant. The ex…whatever Luke is to Jessica these days. She gets it. Matt presses his advantage. “Why do you want me dating anyway? Isn’t that a little nosy brunch lady of you?”

She gives a quiet, disgusted “ugh,” and Matt dances inside. “Nice try, Matt,” she says, pointing the bottle at him. “He’s great, you're…bearable I guess, and I think you should just tank up and meet the guy.”

Matt curls his lip and snatches the bottle out of her hand.

“Someone get a towel, he’s drooling down my back,” Luke interrupts, coming down Matt’s rooftop stairway with Danny slung over his shoulder fireman-style.

“I’m fiiiiiiine,” Danny slurs.

“Some kind of tranquilizer gun,” Luke says shortly, but Matt can hear that he’s biting his words short because if he doesn’t, he’ll start laughing.

“Luke’s so strong,” Danny sighs, as he’s lowered onto the sofa.

Matt coughs delightedly into his glass, and Luke reroutes a laugh so that it comes out an annoyed snort.

Danny inchworms over the sofa until his curls brush Matt’s leg. “Why won’t you date our friend? He’s really wonderful.”

“Danny, I—” Matt sighs. “Does he even want to date a vigilante?”

“Come on, Murdock, you’re deflecting. Spill.” Luke pours himself a drink and settles in for a story.

“There was a guy,” Matt sighs, gesturing for Jessica to refill his glass. She stops after about two fingers and he waves her to continue. “I can say it now, because he’s gone. But I loved him.”

“He died?” Danny’s small voice asked.

“He couldn’t handle this life,” Matt says, but the truth is straining at this throat to get out. “But I didn’t even try to help him learn how to.”

That had came to Matt in a rare flash of insight, about six weeks after Nelson and Murdock folded, after Karen had taken one look at the mask and disappeared off to Brooklyn. Matt had fed Foggy panic after fright after near-death experience with barely any time in between to breathe, and had called him disloyal when he got scared.

Jessica makes a disgusted sound, but it’s the one where she hears a condemnation she thinks she deserves herself; she’s turning her disgust inward.

Danny makes a sad sound. “What was his name?”

Matt smiles, despite himself. “Foggy.”

Jessica sprays whiskey all over Matt’s coffee table. Luke sighs and lopes into the kitchen for a towel.

“It's in my eye,” Danny whines, wiping drops off his face.

“You loved him, huh?” Jessica says, ignoring both Danny and Luke’s muttered scoldings.

“More than anything.” Matt frowns at his glass. It’s hitting him faster than normal, he thinks, but lets Jessica top him up anyway. It doesn’t hurt too much to think about Foggy when his regret is drowning in alcohol.

He tells them about the mundane stuff about living with Foggy when they were younger—making stir-fries in their tiny kitchen, drinking beer on their fire escape in the sweltering summer, feeling so sweaty and contented and indolent they could melt right through the bars. Nearly falling out entirely because Matt thought Robert De Niro’s right to natural justice had been violated in The Untouchables and Foggy insisting it was okay because it was a kick-ass film.

And, when the bottle is finally empty, he does an angry tight five on how dumb did a person have to be to be completely unaware they were in love until it had been going on for years and they were too far down a lonely road of vigilantism to turn back to the point where it all got split apart.

“What if he’s still there?” Luke asks.

Matt’s head is spinning. “Where?”

“Back where the road split. What if he’s still waiting for you?”

Wouldn’t it be nice. “He’s not.”

A hour later, Matt totters off to bed and lands face down, almost too drunk to pull the blankets over himself. At the edge of his hearing, Luke and Danny and Jessica are downstairs, huddled around a phone.

“Hey buddy, I think you may have left out something pretty important,” Luke says, before Jess yanks the phone away.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she hisses. Matt can’t make out the voice on the other side of the line. “Okay, it’s your funeral.”

\---

Around noon the next day, Matt’s phone rings. “Danny Danny Danny.”

Matt groans and slaps at it. “I hate you, why do I feel this way?”

“I’ve got a tranq hangover, dude, you can just blow me,” Danny groans back, voice parched-sounding.

“Ugh,” Matt says, commiserating. “What do you want.”

“You’ve got a date with John tonight.”

“What? Danny, no fucking way—”

“Be on the roof of the Rand building at 8.”

“No! I don't—” Danny hangs up.

\---

There’s a cold snap when Matt’s boots thump down on the roof of the Rand building, but he can pick up the outline of a table and the heat of two of those terrace braziers. There’s no one on the roof, though the floor below is still teeming with late-night workers.

Not five minutes later, his phone pings. It’s a text from Danny. “John’s on his way up. Be nice,” the mechanical voice says. Matt rolls his eyes. He’s always nice. Suddenly, elevator doors open, and there’s a man standing there.

Matt’s an idiot. He should have seen this one coming.

Foggy smells brand new. New jeans, new sweater, new scent of shampoo. His overcoat is so new it makes a cloud with the smell of high quality wool. But underneath all of it, a heartbeat that mocks Matt with its familiarity.

“Hey,” Foggy says.

What’s Matt supposed to say to that? “Hi, Foggy.”

“You look good.”

Okay, Matt decides he doesn’t have time for this. “What are you doing here?”

Foggy’s big overcoat shoulders shrug. “I miss my friend,” he says simply, as if that’s going to fix anything. Matt starts to interrupt but Foggy talks over him. “And I realized that I made a mistake, somewhere between the beginning and here.”

Matt’s heels itch to jump off the roof, because he doesn’t have time to listen to how Foggy realized that he should never have become Matt’s friend in the first place.

Foggy walks to the edge of the roof and looks out over the skyline.

“I’m not saying this because I want you to do anything. And I’m not saying that we have to go back to the way it was. I just. I made a mistake and the longer I let it go, the worse it’s going to get. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Okay, sure, but you haven’t actually said anything.”

Foggy stares at him, and Matt starts to worry he’s angry, but then he tips his head back and laughs fit to shake the stars. Matt can’t help but smile along.

“I love you, Matt,” Foggy says, breathless from laughing and matter of fact. “I love you, and I miss you, and and I’m so mad at you.”

Matt’s heart had been ramping up like a roller-coaster, but it plummets. Of course Foggy’s still mad. Matt doesn’t deserve forgiveness, he’s a Murdock, and Murdock boys got the devil—oh Foggy’s still talking.

“But then I circle back round to I love you, and I don’t want to have a safe, protected life if it doesn’t have you in it. And I never told you, and maybe that was my mistake all along. So this is me, just a lawyer, standing in front of a superhero, asking him if he wants to work some shit out.”

There’s a lump in Matt’s throat that makes it hard to talk. “Yeah,” he croaks. “Okay.”

“Alright then.” Foggy takes Matt’s arm, in a reverse of how he always offered it, and leads him to the table. As if on cue, the elevator dings, and there’s a cart with two cloche-covered dishes on it. “Dinner first,” Foggy says. He palms Matt’s cheek and kisses his face, half on the mask and half on his skin. “Then we’ll talk.”


	5. Matt/Foggy, Jessica/Danny/Luke. Kindergarten Defenders Protect Foggy

The next time that poo-head Matt Murdock said something mean about Foggy Nelson’s hair, Jessica Jones was gonna knock him into next week. Foggy had the nicest hair in their whole kindergarten class, long and blonde, but tickly like a spiderweb and it did get every place. Jessica once found it her inside her sock when she took off her shoe for nap time.

“Get it off me!” Matt yelled, as Foggy leaned over to touch the bumps on Matt’s book.

“I'm sorry!” Foggy yelled back, bunching up all his yellow hair into his fist. Ms. Temple, their teacher, looked up, saw who was yelling, and sighed.

“It’s so gross!” Matt continued, scrubbing at his arm. “It’s like a jellyfish climbing all over me.”

Foggy, now protecting Matt from his jellyfish hair by pulling his t-shirt collar up over his whole head, crossed his arms. “How do you know what that feels like?”

“I just do!” Matt snapped back. Ms. Temple knelt in front of him.

“Matt, what’s making you upset enough to yell?” she asked quietly. Ms. Temple was the best, and Jessica sometimes wished she could have her for a mom, but she wouldn’t ever tell anyone that because every kid in class thought that and Jessica wasn’t going to be like everyone else.

Matt’s mouth turned down more. “His hair touched me.”

“And?”

“And it felt _disgusting_. He should cut it.”

Foggy’s face was so sad, framed by his t-shirt collar. Ms. Temple opened her arms and gently pulled him in to stand in front of Matt. “Foggy’s hair is part of his body and we can’t tell him what to do with it, but maybe we can make sure it doesn’t bother you.”

After asking Foggy if she could touch his hair, Ms. Temple gathered it all up and made a braid that went all the way down his back. She tied it off with a red hair band she had around her wrist, and when Foggy pulled the braid around to look at it, he grinned at the bright colour.

“Do you want to touch it?” Foggy asked. Matt reached up, still frowning, and Foggy put the back of his head into Matt’s hand and let him feel the smooth bumps of the braid.

“I just wanted to read with you,” Foggy said, after Ms. Temple went back to changing the bandage on Frankie Castle's scraped nose.

“Sit over there,” Matt pointed. Foggy dropped to the carpet three feet away and opened the book on his lap, running his finger over the words and reading quietly to himself.

Jessica glared at Matt over her colouring. He couldn’t see her, but she liked to think that he could tell anyway.

“Can I use the nice green,” Luke said, reaching over and tapping the end of the crayon in Jessica’s hand, “before you break it?”

“I’m not going to break it,” Jessica raged, pressing down harder.

“Read quieter,” Matt ordered loudly. Foggy broke off mid-word.

 _Crack_. “Oops.”

Luke sighed and reached for the ugly yellow-green that looked like flu boogers.

\---

At recess, Foggy skipped rope in a corner behind the basketball hoop. Matt was sitting on the ground about six feet away, the corners of his mouth once again turned down like a perfect rainbow.

“Hey guys, come skip with me!” Foggy called.

“Skipping is stupid!” Matt yelled, when Jessica and Luke had taken the ends of skip-rope and Danny and Foggy were screeching out a rhyme about Miss Mary and her steamboat.

“What? No it’s not!” Foggy said, getting tangled up in the rope in shock. “It’s fun! I can show you how if you want.”

“No, you’re stupid!” Matt said, getting to his feet. His hands were clenched into fists and Foggy’s face went all screwed up with sadness.

“Don’t be mad, Matt, we’re sorry. Come on guys, let’s go over there,” Foggy pointed, but Jessica threw her end of the rope on the ground.

“What’s your problem, Murdock?!” she yelled.

“Yeah, why are you always so mean to Foggy?” Danny demanded.

Matt looked shocked “I’m not!”

“A lot of the times you are,” Luke said, but he was a nice kid that everyone loved so he said it softly and nicely, like Ms Temple would have.

Matt blinked, then he threw his head back and started to bawl.

\---

After school, Jessica beckoned over Luke and Danny. Luke’s uncle Bobby was gonna be there soon to walk them all home, but they had a little time to put a plan together.

“Guys, we gotta protect Foggy Nelson from Matt,” she said. The boys nodded solemnly. “Good. Come with me.”

“What are we doing here, BobbyFish’s gonna have to come looking for us!” Danny loved Luke’s uncle and always said his whole name as one word.

“I saw Matt and Foggy go this way. What if Matt's still gonna be mean to Foggy about the skipping? It could be a—”

“A what?”

“A hit,” Jessica whispered. Danny’s and Luke’s eyes went big.

After tactically pretending to play tag so they could get around the back, and then about five minutes of actual tag, they found Matt and Foggy in the yard.

Jessica pressed her back to the wall and slowly moved closer and closer to the edge, Luke and Danny pressed at her back. She peeked around it. 

“Do you really think skipping is stupid?” Foggy was asking. He dug in his backpack and brought out two juice boxes. He stabbed the straw into one and handed it to Matt. Jessica scowled. Juice wasn’t going to make Matt nicer, and anyway Foggy knew that grape was Jessica’s favourite. She hadn't been mean to him at recess.

“No,” Matt said, kicking the pavement. “My dad skips with me all the time, at the gym. Just…why did you ask Jessica and Luke and Danny and not me?“

"I asked you right at the start of recess and you said no!”

“But I didn’t mean no as in no, Foggy!” Matt cried. Foggy nodded like that made sense. "But. I got you this,” Matt said. He held out a daisy. It still had roots attached to it and dirt sprinkled all over Foggy’s feet.

Foggy took the flower solemnly, then grinned like a construction paper banana. He pushed his face against Matt’s face and kissed him.

Jessica gasped and slapped her hand over her mouth.

“What?” Luke tugged at her parka.

“Shhh!” she hissed, pushing at him. He fell backwards onto Danny, who made a sound like when you accidentally sit on a duck.

“Did you hear something?” Foggy said, from around the corner. Jessica peeked out again.

“I don’t know, I hear a lot of things,” Matt said. “Wanna sit on the bleachers with me?”

“Can we hold hands?”

Matt smiled then, and if Foggy’s smile was a happy banana, Matt’s was like a sun drawn with the newest yellow crayon in the box. “Okay.”

As they skipped over to the bleachers, their hands swinging between them, Jessica sat hard down to the ground and crossed her arms. “They like each other, I can’t believe it.”

“I believe it,” Danny said, one finger up his nose. “My friend Ward says that boys are only mean to people they like.”

“What about girls?” Luke asked. “Are they mean to people they like?” Danny shrugged. “Because, Jessica’s mean to a lot of people.”

“I’m mean to you two.” Jessica snapped.

Danny and Luke grinned, and Jessica narrowed her eyes at them. "What?"

“We like you too, Jessica.” They said at the same time. Jessica frowned, feeling like her mouth could be the angry rainbow that Matt’s was, but then Danny and Luke sat down on the ground next to her and started talking about something. After a while, she forgot what they were talking about, but she remembered it made her laugh.


	6. Matt/Foggy. Pregnancy Kink

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's rated E.

When they first got together, they couldn’t agree on a sex position. Matt liked it face down, from behind, and hard enough to knock plaster off the ceiling. Foggy liked it missionary, with lots of kissing, and lasting for hours.

Matt said Foggy’s way was for romance novels. Foggy said Matt’s way made him feel like a demolitions worker.

“That’s kind of the point,” Matt snapped, twin spots of colour coming up on his face.

Seventeen minutes later, Foggy had a fistful of Matt’s hair in one hand and both wrists in the other and was wrecking Matt’s upturned ass like he’d been tasked with reducing a wall into rubble.

 _“Yes,_ Foggy, pound me,” Matt demanded. “ _Harder_ , faster.”

“You got it,” Foggy panted, and switched the image in his mind from sledgehammer to jackhammer.

After, when Matt had come all over the bedsheets, he pushed Foggy onto his back, spread his knees and went down on his elbows on either side of Foggy’s head. Foggy, exhausted and helpless with the need to come, only had to hold his dick still while Matt pushed back onto it and let Matt, eyes shut and lip caught between his teeth, move like a wave breaking over him, slow and inexorable.

“Oh god, Matt,” Foggy moaned, gripping Matt’s rolling hips, “I’m close, I’m gonna come.”

“Come in me,” Matt gasped. “Foggy, come inside me.”

Foggy had a condom on, but the thought of messing up Matt’s pink ass with his spunk made his eyes slam open, and then they slammed shut again as his orgasm wrung itself out of him.

“Holy shit,” Foggy said breathlessly, as Matt went boneless and cuddly on top of him.

“Mmmm,” Matt hummed, eyes shut and nearly asleep.

Years passed, and medical tests were taken, and the condoms stayed in the nightstand unless something especially freaky was happening or unless someone was feeling a little quick off the mark.

Then, for about three weeks in the ninth year of their relationship, the condoms didn’t come out of the drawer at all because no one was getting even a little bit fucked.

“Jesus Christ, Foggy, what are you still doing up,” Matt said, shoving one leg through the window and tossing the Daredevil mask onto the sofa. 

“Not still, just got up,” Foggy yawned from behind a tower of bankers boxes of paperwork. “I’ve got a meeting with the warden at eight in Staten Island and I’m about six weeks behind in research.”

“We need a third lawyer,” Matt groaned, scrubbing at his hair.

Foggy snorted. “No one’ll take us.”

“Yeah, we’re terrible bosses. And I like our sign as it is,” Matt said, stealing a mouthful of Foggy’s coffee and then leaning down for a kiss. “I’ll meet you at the office when you get back.”

“I’m out all day,” Foggy said, taking Matt by the back of the neck and murmuring into the kiss. “Then Karen’s got something for me downtown. I’ll be back after dinner?” he said hopefully.

Matt made a sad noise against his lips. “Stakeout with Danny,” Matt sighed.

Foggy groaned. “We do need a third lawyer. We haven’t had any time together in weeks.”

“As soon as the trial’s over, we’re going on a second honeymoon,” Matt promised.

“Where?”

Matt sunk his teeth into Foggy’s lip. “Our bedroom. We’ll move the fridge in there; we won’t even have to come out for food.”

“Hot,” Foggy chuckled, and tried to pull Matt into his lap. “Sneak preview before I go to Staten Island?”

As if on cue, Matt yawned. “Only if you want me to fall asleep mid-way through.”

“Less hot,” Foggy said ruefully and kissed Matt one last time before pushing him towards the bedroom. “Okay, see you in a few days.”

“Bye, Foggy,” Matt said, pulling shut the door.

\---

Three weeks became a month.

“I miss sex!” Foggy yelled into the phone.

“I miss it too!” Matt yelled back. Foggy knew he was parkouring while talking because the wind whistled down the line. “But I’ve got a bridge to keep from blowing up!”

One month became two months.

“Look, if you’re going to rehearse cross-examination during this, we might as well stop,” Matt said over his shoulder. He was on his hands and knees.

Foggy swept the papers off Matt’s back. “Sorry.”

Two months became ten weeks.

“Matt, cancel everything,” Foggy said, juggling his phone, his briefcase and a bankers’ box of binders as he flew down the the courthouse steps two at a time. “We got a not guilty verdict and I'm on my way home. I don’t care if the Triborough bridge has to eat it tonight for me to get your sweet ass snuggled down on my dick. Tell your little ninja friends you’re staying in.”

There was a long silence. “Damn, Nelson,” Jessica Jones said, feelingly.

“Hi honey, you’re on speaker,” Matt said contritely.

\---

“You’re lucky I’m blind,” Matt panted, ripping at Foggy’s shirt and pinging shirt buttons all over the floor. “I won’t actually have to look Jessica in the eye, because I wouldn’t be able to now.”

“I’m not even sorry,” Foggy said, wrist-deep down the back of Matt’s pants, squeezing and dipping his fingers inside teasingly.

“Oh fuck, just bend me over and fuck me,” Matt groaned, shoving everything down to his knees and going to his elbows on the shoe bench that they kept by the front door.

“Bedroom,” Foggy said, nearly asphyxiating at the sight of Matt’s ass presented like a cake on a plate. He grabbed Matt by the back of his shirt. “Condoms.”

“But I want you bare,” Matt protested, hopping, one leg still stuck in his trousers. Foggy caught him around the waist and carried him the last few steps—superhero or not, he was going to trip on himself and concussions were not sexy, not even on Matt—and tossed him on the bed. “Someone’s feeling it today,” Matt said, bouncing and beaming.

“Turn over,” Foggy ordered, but Matt was already ass-up before the R in “turn”. Foggy fell to his knees next to the bed, eager as a supplicant, and tongued Matt’s rosebud until Matt was snarling that he was _ready, dammit,_ and reaching back to pull Foggy away by the hair. Foggy slapped the hand away and went back to work, this time with three fingers and a generous squirt of lube.

When Matt was clawing at the blankets, Foggy kissed the small of his back and ordered him over again.

“No, like this. Hold me down,” Matt begged, flicking out his tailbone. Foggy grabbed his own cock so he didn’t come immediately onto the floor and gathered Matt up in his arms.

“Please, baby boy,” he said, kissing up one side of Matt’s neck and down the other. “I’ll give it to you it good and hard, I promise, but I want your legs around me. I want to see your pretty face when you come on my cock. Let me put you on your back, baby, please.”

Whatever Matt said in response to that, he was nodding too hard for it to make sense.

“No condoms,” Matt ordered, when Foggy groped around in the drawer.

“Trust me, I’ll need one,” Foggy said, tugging at the wrapper with his teeth. Even his own hand smoothing down the latex sent shivers up his spine.

Matt held his breath as Foggy pushed inside, he still did, after all these years, but the sigh he gave when Foggy bottomed out was triumphant and almost relieved, like the pain of _not_ having Foggy sheathed inside him was starting to ease.

“Good and hard,” Matt said, hooking his knees over Foggy’s shoulders. “You promised.”

Foggy’s soul may have left his body entirely, it felt so good. Not just Matt’s body clamping down on him greedily, but gazing at Matt’s slack, pleasured face. The way his eyes rolled up on a particularly deep thrust. The way Foggy could bend down and kiss his shiny, bitten lips whenever he wanted. The way Matt was too blissed out even to kiss him back.

“You’re gonna come with me,” Foggy said, wrapping a hand around Matt’s cock the fifth or sixth time he thought he was going to tip over the edge.

“ _Yes_ ,” Matt moaned. “Fuck me. God!”

“You gonna come on my dick?” Foggy demanded, feeling like he was out of his body, watching all this from around the level of the ceiling. “You gonna come for me?”

“Foggy. Condom off,” Matt said, eyes suddenly wide. “Come inside me. I want your come in me.”

Foggy blinked, but then he pulled out, whipped off the condom and then guided himself back inside Matt with a heartfelt groan. “You better come soon, because I'm not going to last.”

“Gonna mess me up?” Matt babbled, jerking himself frantically. “Smear it all over me. Fuck, Foggy, come in my ass, I want it deep, want your baby.”

“Oh _fuck.”_ Hands shaking, Foggy bent Matt in half and sealed their mouths together as he came, each spurt inside Matt sending shocks up into his brain because it played into the fantasy that he was planting a little life inside Matt’s body.

Matt was still keening when Foggy came to, his head bent all the way back and his hand a blur on his own cock, so Foggy pistoned his hips, making Matt scoot up the bed. 

“Come on baby,” Foggy said, lips brushing Matt’s ear. “So pretty, Matt, I love you, love you so much, gonna knock you up.”

Matt bit down on his own forearm and came screaming, jerking like he’d been cattle prodded and striping his chest to the collarbone, but as the dazed look cleared from his face, Foggy was right there waiting, curling his arm around Matt’s shoulders and slotting them together on their sides, sticky and sweaty and with no place else they’d rather be.

They lay on each other, winded and overwhelmed, until Foggy’s brain decided it was safe to re-enter the building. “Holy shit, Matt,” he said, almost grinning too hard to pucker up his lips for a kiss, “that was so hot, what was that?”

“I want to adopt,” Matt blurted.

Foggy pulled back to peer intently at Matt’s face. “You’re serious.”

Matt nodded, forehead puckering. “I think I am.”

“Wow, that’s big,” Foggy said. “I need a second to think about that.”

Matt’s face screwed up. “I know it’s sudden—”

Foggy kissed him quiet. “Yes.”

“What?”

“You. Me. A kid. Let’s do it.”

Matt’s smile was pure sunshine. “God, Foggy, I love you. It’s ridiculous how much I—I got so lucky with you.”

Foggy rested Matt’s head on his shoulder. “I’ll remind you of that the first time our kid projectile vomits on you.”


	7. Matt/Foggy. Cyberpunk AU

Karen’s deep in the feeds when Foggy pushes open Matt’s apartment door.

“What are you doing?”

Karen doesn’t turn around, all ten fingers dancing through the holo-projections, swiping lines of code between endlessly scrolling data bursts, toggling feeds and cycling through readouts so quickly it makes Foggy’s irises whir and glitch. “Paying Matt’s bills with your credits,” she says. Her hair is twisted up, and at the base of her neck, Foggy catches sight of an implant in her port, a softly blinking blue light.

“Are you using Matt’s feed-interface?” he demands, horrified. “Do you have any idea of the signal strength he had on that, it’s going directly to your brain! Jesus Christ get that out of you, I gotta take you to the hospital.”

Karen sighs, swishing her hand to disperse the holos before disengaging the implant with no more evident pain than an end-of-day tension headache.

“Not my first cortex-bump,” she says ruefully, dropping the implant in Foggy’s hand.

“I thought you said you were packing the place up,” Foggy says, setting the implant back on the edge of the terminal where Matt always kept it.

“Yeah,” Karen says, drawing out the word. “About that.”

“No, Karen, come on,” he begs.

“I know it’s irrational,” Karen sighs, flopping on the sofa and crossing her blade over her flesh leg. “But I just feel it. He’s not dead.” Foggy wraps his coat tighter around himself and sits down next to her.

“You’ve been drilling down into the unfiltered feeds, haven’t you? I can see it in your face, you’ve been going under for too long. You’re going to give yourself a processing sickness.”

“He’s out there, Foggy,” Karen insists, the light from the neon ad across the street giving her skin a green cast. “He’s eating, or crossing a street, or using a power-up somewhere, and if he is I can find him.”

“And have you found him?” Foggy asks gently.

Karen’s fingers veils her pinched mouth and she turns to stare out the window again. Minutely, reluctantly, she shakes her head.

\---

Matt can hear the dysfunction in Foggy’s body from across the bar. His bio-regulator can’t settle on a single chemical that will even him out. The muscles in his neck are so tight he’s spider-veining out from his data port interface. The ethanol he’s sloshing into his mouth isn’t helping either, corrosive and disregulating.

He’s a sight for sore eyes, as the saying goes.

Smiling a little, the first time he has since he woke up, Matt presses on his wrist implant and accesses the feeds. Across the bar, the implant under Foggy’s wrist lights up.

“No, I don’t need vegetables now,” Foggy mutters, swiping through a grocery store shopping cart. “Why the fuck do you think I’d want a single avocado—” he freezes and cranes his neck, his irises contracting and expanding. They open up full-bore when they land on Matt.

“This isn’t real,” he says flatly.

“It’s real.” Matt’s voice is out of practice, he sounds hoarse and worn thin, and it doesn’t improve at all when Foggy’s arms cinch tight around him. Matt feels Foggy’s shaky, overwhelmed breath puffed warm over his throat and it’s the best argument he’s got so far that he truly is alive. “Hey Foggy.”

“Where have you been—” Foggy demands.

“It doesn’t matter. I just came to tell you…goodbye. You won’t see me again. Hey, shhh,” Matt grips Foggy’s forearm to forestall the outburst. “Whatever you’re going to say, I already know, but it has to be this way.”

“No!” Foggy says angrily, “Matt, do you think I’m just going to let you walk out of my life again—”

Matt grips his best friend by the back of the neck, pulls their foreheads together. His eyes burn, and he tells himself it's just because he needs a power-up on his sensory-damper implants but it’s not that. “Goodbye, Foggy,” he says.

He says it, and he means it, but his palm can’t disengage from the smooth skin at the nape of Foggy’s neck, flesh sinews and bio-steel cording up his spine, soft hair, fast pulse made spiky with anger and heartbreak. Matt clenches his jaw, triggering his bio-regulator to flood him with something calming, but it doesn’t help. Nothing has ever helped when it comes to Foggy, and Matt stumbles, fumbles, kisses him.

“Matt, don’t do this to me,” Foggy pleads when they break apart. 

“I’m sorry, Foggy,” Matt says, meaning it, and disengages.

As he walks away, his wrist implant beeps and the feed inside his head flashes a message.

_Identification duplicated: New York State Bar Association Licence._


	8. Matt/Foggy. Frank goes undercover as Foggy's date

The note in Foggy’s briefcase says “Meet me on the roof at sundown. Don’t bring your friends”.

Foggy looks around at the piles of boxes, the office chairs still wrapped in plastic; Nelson and Murdock and Page, coming to life out of the ashes of fear and mistrust and blood-spattered legal documents and above all, secrecy. Don't bring his friends? No way in hell.

“Hey Matt, hey Karen?” Two heads—one blonde, one dark—pop out their respective offices into the hallway. “You guys doing anything after work?”

\---

“Why is it always rooftops,” Karen grouses, hitching her coat collar higher.

“Drama,” Foggy sighs.

“Why do I feel that was directed at me?” Matt says, blowing on his hands.

Foggy’s enjoying this, but he snorts like he’s actually grumpy. “Because I directed it at you.”

“I didn’t write the damn note,” Matt retorts. “For once, I’ve got less of an idea about what’s going on than you do.”

“That’s not new, that’s your natural state,” Karen says, but she’s smirking while she says it.

“What is this, the Matt Murdock insult-a-thon?”

“Oh, we should have one of those,” Foggy says, snapping his fingers. “Like a kissing booth but you get to make fun of him. We’d get a few hundred bucks out of Jessica Jones alone.”

Karen snorts a laugh as Matt’s face puckers like a cat’s butthole when its been shoved out into the snow.

“When I said ‘don’t bring your friends'…” A gravelly voice slices through the night, seeming to come from every point around them simultaneously. Both Karen and Foggy whip around—in different directions—and Matt goes battlefield tense. Frank Castle detaches himself from shadow, hands raised and face as open as Foggy’s ever seen it. “Easy, gang, easy.”

The Punisher—yeah, Foggy knows that name from the news, couldn’t really turn away from it, could he?—holds opens his coat, and shows off a torso naked only for a black flannel shirt and a black tee underneath. He doesn’t look armed, but when did anyone fare any better in a fight just because Frank wasn’t packing? Matt could go for his cane; it’s only a few feet away. Foggy could go for his phone and even though Karen doesn’t do the handbag and heels thing since becoming an investigator, he’s sure that her piece is about her person somewhere. They could—with a lot of luck—get out of this alive.

Karen’s the one who breaks the standoff. “Frank, seriously?”

“Ms. Page,” he dips his lashes when he greets her. She scoffs and turns her back on him, rubbing Foggy’s arm reassuringly like she can smell his panic. That’s fine. His panic is frequently pungent.

Frank lifts his chin at Matt. “S'up, Red,” he says easily, which Matt only responds to with a muttered “shit.”

“What the hell, Matt,” Foggy says, to cover his feelings, “you couldn’t hear him coming?”

“How was I supposed to hear anything over the sound of you two clucking hens,” Matt shoots back.

“Glad to see the band’s back together,” Frank says, a hint of a smile on his face.

“No thanks to you,” Matt snarls, which is strictly accurate but also enormously unfair. “What do you want?”

“I hear you got a high-school reunion coming up,” Frank says.

“What?” Matt’s eyebrows shoot up. “No, I don’t.”

“Not you, Red,” Frank says, exasperated. “Foggy here.”

Oh damn, there goes Foggy’s plan of slinking back into the darkness while the crazy people have it out. “Uh, yeah. Next week.”

“Awesome,” Frank drawls. “I need you to take me as your date.”

Matt, pissy and hip-shot, snorting derisively at every syllable out of Frank’s mouth, somehow misjudges the distance between his hand and the railing he’s leaning on and face-plants to the ground, arms windmilling.

“Nice one, Chaplin,” Frank says, not missing a beat. He hands a photo to Foggy “You know this lady? Moira. She’ll be at your reunion. I need an in.”

“Are you gonna…” Foggy fires a finger gun at Frank with a little bang sound effect.

“Depends on what I find out,” Frank sighs. “She’s either crooked as satan’s personal attorney—”

“Hey,” Matt says, but everyone ignores him.

“—Or her CFO’s skimming big time and setting her up to be the stooge of all stooges.”

Foggy hands the photo back. “You better wear a nice suit.”

\---

“I don’t think this is a good plan,” Matt says, kicking the floor in Foggy’s bedroom with his socked foot like he’s been put in the naughty corner.

Foggy repurposes an incredulous snort into a mild “hmmm” and watches Matt in the mirror as he fixes his tie. Over his shoulder, Matt’s so hunched he’s practically elbow deep in his own pockets, all restless feet and sulky-toddler face.

“All I gotta do is get Frank into the party, Matt. If you hear anything you don’t like, you can swing right on in and save me.”

Matt mumbles something and scuffs the floor again. Foggy can’t help it, he smiles at the childlike picture Matt makes. Corporate intrigue aside, it’s a low-stakes problem, as far as their problems go, and without the mortal dread and choking fear taking up space in Foggy’s chest, he’s got a lot of room for his heart to grow seven sizes at Matt being cute. “It’s just a job, Matt.”

\---

Just a job, Matt’s shapely Irish ass. If Karen and her laptop and her rental car full of ill-gotten files didn’t all corroborate that Moira was a real person and in real trouble, Matt would swear that this is all Frank’s plan pour champagne down Foggy’s throat and flirt with him until he’s too turned around to stay on his feet. 

“Mic check, one two three,” Foggy had started, jamming his finger in his ear like a conspicuous idiot.

At the bar, hunched low over a tumbler of barely-adequate scotch, Matt lifted his wrist to his mouth and muttered “knock it off, Foggy, this isn’t that kind of movie.”

“Spoil my fun, why don’t you—”

“Foggy there’s someone on your six, approaching fast—” Matt hissed. The figure reached out and put a hand on Foggy’s shoulder, and Matt was up, out of his seat and ready to bust heads—

“Hey honey,” Frank’s voice was dark chocolate, and the kiss he dropped on Foggy’s gawping mouth was intimate and easy. “Sorry, I’m late.”

Matt hurriedly sat down again. 

“Wow, Fr—uh. Pete. You look—amazing,” Foggy said, and Matt put his palm flat on the bar so he didn’t draw attention by cracking a crystal glass in his bare hand.

Matt waggles his empty glass at the bartender. “Another.”

Frank charms everyone—ex jocks, ex nerds, ex teachers, and when Matt’s ears aren’t full of Frank and Foggy calling each other babe and honey, it’s wall to wall comments about relationship goals or joking-not-joking plotting to finagle a threesome.

On one of the rare occasions that Foggy and Frank aren’t joined at the hip, one of the ladies, who has spent the evening making very good friends with the cocktail menu, sidles up to Frank and runs her fingers up and down his tie. “You gotta tell me the secret,” she says, giggly drunk but with a bass-line of aroused honesty, “what kinky shit can Foggy Nelson do that keeps you in his bed?”

Frank sucks on his teeth. “Would you believe his personality was enough for me?”

“Fuck no. You _scream_ sex, and not the vanilla kind either, and Foggy—well.”

“Alright, you wanna know?” Frank rumbles and bends low to whisper in her ear.

Her temperature shoots up as Frank talks, and at the bar, Matt’s does too, because Frank spins a tale of slick skin and bitten off cries and being kept on the edge for hours…

“Oh my god,” she whispers, squeezing her thighs together. “Oh Pete, you can’t talk to a girl like that.”

“Why not?” Frank chuckles, “it’s not like you’re ever going to have any of it.”

She jerks back. “What? I—”

“I might kiss and tell, but I don’t share,” Frank says, and as she gapes, he marches right over to Foggy and bends him over his arm with a devastating kiss that goes on and on and on.

“What was that for?” Foggy gasps, when the kiss is over, a full 18 months later.

“You were looking hot and too far away,” Frank says, voice full of fake shyness.

The lady, fuming, slams her purse on the bar next to Matt and demands another drink. Matt’s tempted to pay for it in solidarity.

\---

“Christ, I’m sorry I’m late,” someone apologizes to the room at large, shaking rain from a trench coat, “hazards of being a detective, can’t just clock…off…”

“Brett!” Foggy’s voice goes stratospherically squeaky. “This is my boyfriend, uh…”

“Pete.” Frank puts out his hand. Brett’s heart does something that would have Matt sprinting for a defib machine if he didn’t have Frank’s cover to maintain.

“Pete….” Brett says in a tiny voice. “Hi.”

“So this is the famous Brett, huh?” Frank says, and it’s freakish, how normal he sounds. “Let me get you a drink, and you can tell me embarrassing stories about Foggy.”

Brett’s heart spasms as Frank puts an enormous arm around him but he still goes, and that’s a real hero. Frank walks him out to Karen in their rental car HQ, who briefs him at light speed and hands him an earwig.

“You got this, guy?” Frank says, supportive and earnest, patting Brett on the arms and peering into his face like he’s a little league coach with a hesitant batter and not a mass murderer.

“I should fucking arrest you,” Brett grouses, but he’s putting the earwig in.

Frank snorts. “Get in line.”

\---

Frank’s mark—Moira—it’s not looking good for her, the way she starts avoiding them the second Pete humblebrags that he’s in the FBI. It’s not evidence of wrongdoing, but she’s definitely hiding something.

“She’s eyeing the exits,” Brett says, covering the front door under the guise of being an old tired cop who needs a sit-down with a cup of coffee. “I think she’s gonna make a break for it. Anyone got a plan?”

“Can I trust you to react to this properly?” Frank rumbles.

“To what properly—” Foggy sputters, and as Moira crosses right in front of them, Frank reaches into his pocket. Matt’s a single muscle twitch away from vaulting into action. “Oh My GOD!”

Frank clears his throat and pitches his voice to carry. “Foggy Nelson, will you marry me?”

People gasp. Matt whirls around on his barstool, jaw hanging. Moira’s trapped, inches away from the scene and all eyes turning towards her.

“Fr…Pete—this is, but we're—holy shit, Pete, where did this ring come from?”

“Foggy,” Frank says, getting down on one knee. He holds out his wine glass to Moira, who takes it dumbly. “Sorry, can you hold this? Foggy, when we first met, I felt like I was trapped in a box, and you got me out.” Matt and Brett groan in unison. “Baby, I love you and I want to be with you always.”

“Pete…”

“Please say yes, Foggy.”

Matt doesn’t actually hear what Foggy says, but he pulls Frank up off his knees and kisses him and people are clapping and Brett and Karen are closing in on Moira, who’s too dumbstruck to do anything but play side-table.

The job’s over, Matt’s brain registers, and then he’s up and through the crowd and into the men’s room and into a stall and slam the door and—

Matt hates crying, and he screws up his whole face trying to keep it all in, fists aching to pound the walls.

This was just a job, but it’s going to happen one day. Someone is going to get down on one knee for Foggy, and he’s going to say yes and Matt…will be about ten feet away, unable to stop it and dying inside. With deliberate movements, Matt folds up his glasses and puts them in his pocket. Then he stops trying to keep it in. He’s not overreacting at a fake proposal. He’s doing all his grieving in advance so he can smile when it happens for real.

Suddenly there’s a knock on the stall door. Shit. Not paying attention. He let someone sneak right up on him. “Hey, I’m missing an idiot best friend, is he in here?”

Matt wipes his nose. “No,” he calls. He can hear the eye-roll, but he unlatches the door anyway.

Foggy’s breath hitches when he sees the sorry picture Matt makes but pulls him into a hug—back to front, chin hooked over Matt’s shoulder—anyway. “Hey, shhhh, I got you, dumbass, I got you.”

“I’m gonna keep crying if you keep insulting me,” Matt says, but the familiar exasperation in Foggy’s voice—it’s helping.

“Whatever, loser,” Foggy says, rocking him gently. “Shh shh shh, it’s ok.” He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He probably knows.

“It’s fine, Foggy, get back out there with Frank.”

“You want to know what I was thinking the whole time?” Foggy asks. Matt shakes his head. “Well, I’m gonna tell you anyway. Frank’s a crazy scary hottie, but I was just pretending he was you.”

Matt hiccups a laugh. “You’re just trying to be nice to me.”

“Matt, it’s been nearly a decade of me trying to be nice to you. When are you going to get the hint?”

Matt turns around in Foggy’s arms. “Is now too late?”

“You dumb little duckling, of course not,” Foggy says, indulgently, patting Matt’s face dry with his cuffs. “Now do you wanna stand here like a sad panda some more or do you want to let me take you home?”

Home. He wants home. And Foggy. Because they’ve always been the same thing. “Be nice to me some more. After tonight, I deserve it.”

Foggy grins into Matt's neck. “Whaddya want, an ice cream?”

“No,” Matt says, snuffling into his wrist. He’s still crying, but it’s different—like a joyfully bubbling fountain rather than a crumbling dam. “I want a kiss.”

Foggy laughs, and it echoes. “You got it.”

\---

“Matt knows his mic is on, right?” Karen said, tilting the popcorn bag in Frank’s direction. They were sitting three in a row on the back bumper of the rental, Frank’s earwig pulled out as far as it go and plugged into Karen’s ear.

Frank shoved a handful into his mouth and tilted the bag in the other direction. “You think I’m gonna get that ring back?”

“Do you think eating popcorn with an enemy of the state is a fireable offence?” Brett sighed, reaching in.

“Oh, don’t worry about that, I have chips too,” Karen said.


	9. Matt/Foggy. Single Dad Matt

This is how it goes when you’re an unmarried superhero with twins: Claire babysits Abigail and Jack on Monday afternoons, and then her mom up in Harlem takes them at sundown when the Night Nurse clinic has to open.

Luke takes them to school on Tuesday mornings and picks them up afterwards to take them to Matt’s apartment in time for dinner. He sticks around because the twins love riding around on his back, and because he’s willing to be paid in double portions of Matt’s vegetarian shepherd’s pie. This makes him slow and burpy on patrol but it’s not like he’s got a pressing requirement to outrun bullets like Matt does.

After school on Wednesdays it’s Danny, and then Colleen joins them when the dojo closes—Matt has a standing order for dumplings from Royal Dragon for her to pick up along the way.

Thursday it’s a bit of a free-for-all, and Matt has spent way too many lunch times shaking the phone tree to see who’s available. Sometimes he has to impose on one of the babysitters who’ve already come around in the week already, but other times it’s someone on the periphery of Matt’s friend group, like Misty Knight or Ray Nadeem. Once Bucky Barnes showed up with a stack of board-games under his arm and a tone of determination in his voice not unsuited to the battlefield. Sometimes, even one of the don’t-like-kids brigade will lend a hand. Matt’s come home more than once to find Jessica Jones on her knees next to his sleeping daughter’s bed, hesitantly touching Abby’s hair and whispering fierce promises that she will grow up safe. 

On Fridays, Matt takes off work at 2pm to get to the elementary school by 3, and everyone in the whole of the New York City legal system, from the judges at the courthouse to articling students at Matt’s firm, does their best to preserve this time.

Saturdays is Matt’s day, all day, and it’s heaven. 

In the morning, the twins sneak into bed with him even before the security shutters on the bodegas have rattled up, and they think that if they get in at the foot of the bed, Matt won’t notice. The fact that Jack and Abby shush each other like they’re clowns in a particularly unsubtle vaudevillian act doesn’t help either.

But Matt buries his face in his pillow and makes fake snoring sounds and tries not to laugh at his children who are at this moment trying to marine-crawl stealthily under the blankets.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Abby says disappointedly when she emerges from under Matt’s arm at the top of the bed. “Jack, he’s awake.”

Matt’s tousle-headed son (Murdock boys got the devil in them, and also hair that wouldn’t lie flat in a rainstorm) pops up from under his other arm. “But we were so quiet.”

“You know dad sleeps light,” Matt says, flipping the blankets back over their heads and bundling them up into a wriggling, shrieking-laughing parcel that he hefts with both arms. As he carries them down the hall, Jack’s foot kicks out perilously close to Matt’s chin and when Matt blows cold air on it, the foot retracts with a squeal.

He places the cocoon gently on Abby’s bed, and the whole thing unfurls. His daughter lolls off the bed onto Matt’s feet with a blergh noise. “Come on, get dressed,” Matt says, clapping his hands, “First one with all the right clothes on gets to help with the pancakes.”

“But _you’re_ in your pyjamas,” Abby points out.

“My clothes are more uncomfortable than yours,” Matt shoots back sweetly, tugging a t-shirt over Jack’s head. “Saturday’s my day off.”

Later in the kitchen, Matt pops Jack on a step stool and guides him through the steps of mixing flour, baking powder, milk, eggs, and chocolate chips in a bowl while keeping an ear out for the butter melting in the pan. Abby marches up with his phone held high over her head.

“Rand Rand Rand,” the phone says, as Abby shoves it in Matt’s hand and ambles away singing the ringtone under her breath.

“Why are you calling me on a weekend, Daniel?” Matt says, instead of hello. He can hear several people breathing, which means he’s on speakerphone.

When no one says anything, Matt gets worried. “Don’t be angry,” a voice says—Colleen— and that’s when Matt clicks off the stove and puts his hand on Jack’s head to still him. He’s given up the whisk and is obliterating flour lumps with his bare hands.

“What’s going on, guys?” Matt braces for bad news, but what he hears instead is that four of his best friends are going into business together—Danny and Luke, Misty and Colleen. “That’s great!” Matt says, as Jack claps his hands over his head and sprays batter droplets everywhere.

“We won’t be able to take the twins until things settle,” Luke says carefully. “And maybe not even then.”

Matt snags a dishcloth from behind him and starts wiping at his son. “Right. Of course, that makes sense. Luke, don’t even worry about it, this is a great thing for you, all of you, and I’ll just—”

“We found you a replacement.”

“A what?”

“A professional babysitter,” Danny says. “Personally vetted. _Thoroughly_ vetted.”

“Why does that sound dirty when I know he means a background check?” Colleen whispers. The bewildered “I don’t know,” she gets in reply is all Misty.

“And what are they going to say when I climb in the window wearing an outfit they might recognize from the Bulletin’s crime pages?” Matt asks, part objection, part real question.

“You strip down on the roof all the time,” Danny scoffs, and Matt grumbles an agreement.

Matt makes a few more pro-forma objections, but secretly he’s touched, and agrees to greet the babysitter the next night.

“Okay Abby, you have your book, and Jack is colouring, and there’s food in the oven…” Matt knows he’s buzzing around like a neurotic bumblebee but he can’t help it. “And the babysitter should be here any minute now, unless they’re a bad babysitter and they’re late.”

Matt pulls on his hair. What the hell does Danny Rand know about vetting child-care providers? It could be anyone. It could be a twelve-year old. It could be an intern sent here for a hazing. It could be _Ward Meachum_. Instinctively, Matt’s arms curl protectively around his children.

“Dad, I can’t see,” Jack complains, shoving him away.

The knock at the door makes him jump, which is an indicator of how spun up he was getting. “The babysitter’s here!” Abigail screams, tearing for the door.

 _Stop her, it could be an axe-murderer_ , Matt’s brain supplies. _Or an encyclopaedia salesman_.

“Hi! I’m Foggy Nelson, I’m your new—Matt Murdock?”

Abigail’s head shoves Matt’s leg aside. “You’re going to be our new dad?” Jack peeks out from behind Matt’s other leg.

“No, I'm—Hey, you must be Abigail!”

“Foggy Nelson?” Matt says blankly. “From Hogarth and Associates?”

“Yep.” Abigail lifts her arms in the universal Y sign of “pick me up now” and Nelson does. “And you’re Matt Murdock, star attorney.”

“Yeah—I mean no. Sorry, this isn’t a great time, my babysitter is supposed to be here any second.”

“Yep,” Nelson says again, bouncing Matt’s daughter and making her laugh. Traitor. She’s out of Matt’s will. “That’s me.” Jack, intrigued by his sister’s adventure, comes out from behind Matt and starts climbing Nelson’s leg.

Matt crosses his arms, feeling strangely abandoned. “Sorry?”

“I’m your babysitter.”

Matt frowns. “Why does an associate need babysitting money?”

“Oh, I’ve got,” Nelson whispers behind his hand. “—baby rabies.”

“Does… that mean you need to be kept away from my children and eventually be put down behind the woodshed?” Matt asks slowly.

Nelson laughs, and hikes Jack up on his other hip. “Come on, lets get inside before your dad lets out all the heat,” he says, and Matt, completely without meaning to, steps back to let them in. “Okay, it’s about 6 o’clsock, and I smell something in the oven, so why don’t you two go wash your hands and I’ll get dinner ready?”

Matt’s children jump down and run to the bathroom, actually shoving in front of each other to get to the sink first.

“I want to have kids,” Nelson says bluntly, when they’re alone, “but I’m not great at the dating and relationship stuff that usually comes before. Now I could cry about that all on my lonesome or I could put myself at your service.”

“That's—” _hinky,_ Matt thinks. There’s no way around it. A grown man going this far out of his way to be around kids? Even ignoring the truly vile possible motives behind that, he’s not sure how he feels about someone bringing this much of their personal feelings into what’s supposed to be a professional relationship. “My kids aren’t therapy props.”

“Never said they were,” Nelson says easily. “I’ll be good with them. I’m first-aid certified. I don’t smoke or do drugs. I have a hard-drive full of recipes for every single known food restriction or preference, and every one of my past families will phone you personally as a reference. You’ll want to block off a few days for that, I’ve been doing this since law school,” he says. Matt blinks, and Nelson pats his shoulder. “I’ll take good care of your kids, Matt. You don’t have to worry.”

Matt doesn’t worry so much as feel two conflicting forms of paralysis at the same time, frozen by the door with his Daredevil suit in a duffle bag, watching Nelson lift Matt’s babies into their booster seats and tuck napkins into their collars. First is the normal, baseline concern for the twins’ safety around new people, no matter how sweet and accredited they are. The second…Foggy Nelson is not a good babysitter, he’s the best babysitter. He might be better with Matt’s kids than Matt is. And that’s terrifying.

“Okay, everyone come kiss daddy goodbye, or else he’ll never leave,” Foggy wipes Jack’s mouth with a napkin and holds him up to Matt’s.

“Bye Daddy, I love you,” Jack chirps, and kisses Matt’s nose.

“Bye Jack,” Matt says. “Bye princess,” he says when Abigail gets the same treatment.

“Kiss Foggy now, Daddy,” Abby orders.

“What? No,” both Matt and Foggy say, in unison. There’s a grumpy silence. “What’s your face doing, Abigail?”

“It’s frowning,” she says, petulant and nasal and making Matt smile against his will.

“Oh no, we can’t have that,” Foggy says, scooping her up. “Clench up, Murdock, I’m coming in.”

“What?” Matt definitely doesn’t yelp. Foggy smacks a kiss on fresh air, about an inch away from Matt’s skin, but in his arms, Abigail kicks her feet like she’s spurring a warhorse to charge and Foggy lurches forward.

Right onto Matt’s mouth.

It’s shock that keeps Matt from moving, right? Not how soft Foggy’s lips are, or how good he smells, or how carefully he’s holding Matt’s daughter even though they’re still kissing.

They break apart silently, and maybe it’s Matt’s hallucination that Foggy’s lips press against his one last time, feather-light, like a farewell.

“Okay, you can go now,” Abigail decrees.

“You heard the lady,” Foggy sniggers. “Be on your way.”

“Okay,” Matt says dumbly. “Uh, will you be here when I get back?” He has a vague memory of being good at flirting, waaaay before the kids came along.

“Yeah, Matt, I’ll be here. I’m not going to sneak out to the movies once they’re asleep.”

“Right. Good.” Matt clears his throat, but Foggy’s attention is already on Jack, exclaiming over his colouring, and Abigail, making listening noises at the story she’s telling him, all the while picking up the dinner dishes. “Bye,” Matt calls.

“Bye babe,” Foggy says. Matt freezes, but Foggy doesn’t seem to have noticed, too busy pulling apples out of the fridge and telling Jack they can carve them up to look like turtles.

Up on the roof, Danny swings his feet while Matt struggles into his suit. “So, do you like Foggy?”

“Yeah, he’s okay,” Matt coughs.

Danny actually claps his hands. “I know you probably don’t care about this, but he’s also very cute.”

“You’re right, I don’t care about…” Matt starts. “How cute?”

Danny’s cackle pierces the night.

_15 years later, an anniversary party:_

“And that’s the moment I knew Matt was toast,” Danny says, and the audience roars with laughter and applause. “Friends, family, raise your glasses to the Nelson-Murdocks. Happy anniversary, you pair of hopeless fools.”

At the head table, Foggy elbows Matt. “ _That’s_ why you insist on calling me babe when you’re pissed off?”

Matt pulls Foggy close and kisses his smirk. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ew, dads,” Abigail moans into her hands. Jack rolls his eyes.

“I wouldn’t complain Princess, this is all your fault after all.”


	10. Matt/Foggy, Karen/Elektra. Royalty AU with Prince Foggy

When Matt called Elektra “princess” as kids, it was supposed to be a joke. She wasn’t supposed to sit him down at the age of 25 and reveal that she was actually a descendant of a minor branch of the Greek monarchy.

“But you can barely make rent!” Matt burst out, throwing his arm out at her tiny Soho studio.

“It’s not a rich branch!” she yelled back.

Matt pressed his lips together. “I’m not bowing.”

“I’m not asking you to!” She threw her hands up, her voice sharp and angular with frustration, but then her shoulders slumped. “Not even if I was wearing a crown?”

Matt thought of his best friend and foster sister with a big wad of gold on her head, and thought about exactly how big her grin and how bright her eyes would be. She did love a good bit of bling. He threw himself onto Elektra’s squashy sofa and opened his arms. She fell into them and buried her face in his shoulder. “Depends on the crown,” he said, kissing her head. Elektra made a distressed sound and mumbled something into his neck. “Sorry?”

“I said,” she lifted her head. “They’re marrying me off.”

“They’re what?” Matt screeched. “To who?”

Elektra put her head down again. “I don’t know. Come to Aldovia with me and find out?”

\---

Elektra’s extended family might not have supported her life in New York, but they sprang for the private jet and enough clothes for both her and Matt so that they arrived in the tiny European principality looking—not quite royal but many steps up from the American west-side down-on-their-luck 20-somethings that they were.

As the plane’s stairs descended with a high-tech hiss, Matt stuck his head out and inhaled a foreign country that smelled of clean air and honeysuckle. There was a young man standing at the edge of the airstrip, his carriage so upright that he had to be some sort of butler. Or a diplomat with a broom up the back of his shirt.

“Good Morning and welcome to Aldovia,” he said, his voice softly accented. “How was your flight?”

“Are you our welcoming party?” Elektra said, descending in a graceful stride she’d practiced in her building’s concrete stairwell. “Just you?”

Matt’s head whipped around. “Be nice,” he muttered.

“If I’m too nice, they’ll never take me seriously as a princess,” she muttered back. Matt didn’t know enough about royalty to argue with that.

“Oh yeah, sorry about that. I mean. The honour has indeed fallen on me alone,” their host really did have a lovely voice, even though he didn’t talk like Matt expected a European butler-or-other to talk. He spoke like a foreign student at Columbia might, after years brining in the accent of the upper west side of New York. He put out his hand to Elektra. “I’m Foggy. I’ll be driving you to the palace.”

She took it delicately. “Lady Elektra of the Hellenes.”

Foggy bowed. "Welcome to Aldovia. And what’s your name?“

Matt shook himself. Was the butler/chauffeur talking to him? "Oh. Matt. Matt Murdock. The foster-brother.”

Foggy’s grip was strong and soft. “Oh. Hey.”

\---

On the winding drive, Elektra sat in the back of the convertible, her hair done up in a scarf, Grace-of-Monaco style, and Matt in the front with Foggy.

"Alright,” Matt said lowly, “tell me how to protect her.”

“Protect her from what?”

“I don’t even know,” Matt said, suddenly more frustrated than he had been to this point—more than the haircut or when the tailor ran his hand all the way up Matt’s leg, more than when he’d overheard Elektra on the phone with her relatives, asking permission for Matt to come too, and even though he didn’t speak Greek, he’d recognized that great-aunt’s tone of voice when she spat his name. “We’re both new to this. Who could hurt her here?”

Foggy sighed, and it had a shade of Matt’s frustration, which was not encouraging. “Anyone.”

Behind them, Elektra was in her own world, twisting her hands in her lap and running over all the etiquettes and orders of precedents she’d crammed in preparation for this trip. Matt rubbed his face. “Shit.”

“Sorry,” Foggy said, patting Matt’s knee. “I’ll help however I can. Your Grace,” he called over the wind. “Would you like to see what Aldovia really has to offer? We’re passing my favourite winery in a few minutes.”

“Won’t someone be expecting me at the palace?”

“Oh probably, but don’t you like wine?” Matt couldn’t help but smile at the conspiratorial grin that was audible in Foggy’s voice.

Elektra leaned forward and put her elbows on the backs of their seats. “I love wine.”

\---

Several hours later, tipsy and flushed and stresses forgotten, the three of them fell back into the convertible.

“Oh god, I’m all red,” Elektra moaned, looking at herself in a mirrored compact.

“The royal family is always more pleasant when you’re drunk, princess,” Foggy reassured. “Even to each other.”

They drove along, slightly swervy but completely alone on wide, rolling roads, chattering and laughing, and Matt thought about how, in the future, when Elektra was queen of this far-off country, they probably wouldn’t be able to have this. Even if Foggy were to stay on as her chauffeur, this might be the last time she got to be so carefree.

“So tell me about the prince,” Elektra shouted over the whistling wind, her hair whipping back, and her arms hugging both the driver-side seat and Foggy’s shoulders.

“Uhhhh,” Foggy said.

“What she means is: is he as cute as you?” Matt laughed, loose-tongued and warm in the face.

“I’m not sure I should answer that,” Foggy chuckled, “I could get charged with treason no matter what I say.”

Elektra twisted around the seat and kissed his face, her hair whipping into Matt and tickling his nose. “I’m so glad you were the welcoming party, Foggy.”

\---

When dirt road became fancy gravel, and the trees went from wild and wooly to tidy manicured rows, Matt reasoned they were approaching the royal palace.

“Wait,” Elektra said, her hair tidied up under her scarf again and her flushed cheeks powdered, “didn’t we just pass the front entrance?”

“No one there worth meeting, ” Foggy scoffed, and drove past a number of smaller structures that smelled like horses and lawn-care equipment. He pulled to a stop outside what was clearly the kitchen, based on the smells and shouting coming out of the open windows.

“Foggy!” Someone was yelling from inside, feet pounding down stone steps. “Goddammit Foggy—”

“Crap, that’s the boss. Sorry, your Grace, but I’ve got to run.” Foggy slammed the driver’s side door and blew kisses at them both before disappearing.

“Foggy!” A tall woman burst out of an open door, scattering uniformed workers. “Where are—oh dammit.” When she caught sight of Elektra and Matt, sitting bemusedly in the car, she curtsied while opening Elektra’s door. “Your Grace, welcome. I’m the housekeeper. My name is Karen.”

“Hello,” Elektra said, stepping out lightly. Matt, tumbling out on his side, raised his eyebrow at the flirtation in her tone. “Are you the one who’ll be taking care of me?”

Karen curtsied again. “I’m one of them, Your Grace.”

“What’s in the water here? We’re two for two on absolute stunners,” Elektra whispered to Matt as the housekeeper gave orders to a few of the workers attending her.

“Trust me, I will be having words with whoever dropped you off here but let me take you to your rooms.” Karen said. Elektra, instead of following, threaded her arm through Karen’s (whose calm and competent bearing faltered only a little) and left Matt to deal with the luggage. And by deal with, he meant stand around like a dweeb while a burly footman hip-checked him aside and picked up all three of their suitcases at once. 

\---

In his stateroom, Matt mulled over the chauffeur’s warnings about Elektra getting hurt. He wondered if Foggy meant the prince. The Queen, when Elektra and he had finally met her, had been about as regal and distant as old-guard royalty always were in the movies, but she’d shaken Matt’s filthy commoner hand without any sign of discomfort, and when Elektra had admitted she was in the country with only her foster-brother for support, the Queen had immediately picked up a fancy telephone and arranged for a small army of maids to be assigned to her. On the other side of the line, Karen the housekeeper had promised to take care of it personally. 

And the chauffeur. Insubordinate was the only word Matt could come up with. But still, a friend amongst the below stairs people would be useful. Matt snorted at himself. An hour in a palace and he was already thinking like an evil Downton Abbey character. 

Foggy had been charming, though. And Matt caught himself smiling whenever he thought of him. Maybe while the heir to the throne of Aldovia swept Elektra off her feet, Matt could be amongst the working folk, finding his own prince.

Matt could barely make out the talking from three floors away, where Elektra was taking a private tea with the Queen, so he stepped into the bathroom which, if the way his whistle echoed was right, dwarfed his whole apartment back home. He was climbing out of an indolent, sandalwood-scented bath when Elektra’s angry shout rattled through the palace walls. “Prince Franklin?!”

Well that wasn’t good. Matt started casting around for his jeans. Seconds later, his door burst open. “Matt, get out here!” Elektra yelled.

“Your Grace!” That was Foggy’s voice. Matt raked his hair back and tugged his waistband down an inch and stepped out of the bathroom.

“What's—” That’s all he got out.

“Oh my god,” Foggy said softly, and Matt was graced with a brief moment of fluttery happiness before Elektra yelled over him.

“He’s the prince! Foggy’s the prince.”

Matt suddenly felt very naked, and turned his back on both Foggy—the prince's—apologies and Elektra’s outrage to put on a shirt and find his glasses.

“I just wanted you to meet a friendly face first,” Foggy was protesting.

“Honest and hostile is preferable to friendly and fake!” Elektra spat back.

“Your Grace, please—”

“Your Highness,” Matt interjected firmly, once his glasses were settled on his nose, “I think you better leave.”

Elektra made it two seconds past the quiet click of the door closing before she fell into Matt’s arms and hid her face against his neck, crumpled but stonily refusing to cry.

\---

Even though they were both expected at a formal dinner with the Queen, no one bothered them that evening, so they gathered up every single pillow in their rooms onto Matt’s bed, propped Elektra’s laptop on their side-by-side knees and binge-watched One Day at a Time.

At dinner time, trays appeared at their door, with a letter.

“‘Your Grace,” Elektra read aloud, “'I had no idea this terrible trick was being played on you, and I’m so sorry your relations with the royal family have been damaged by the prince’s behaviour. If you require anything during the rest of your time here, please allow me to provide it. Believe me to be, Your Grace, most ardently at your service. Karen.”

“Wow,” Matt said, committing those earnest, almost romantic words to memory for a later time. “What’s for dinner?”

Elektra ignored him, and ran her fingers over the folded paper, reading the words to herself again and again. 

\---

A few days later, Matt found Prince Franklin sitting at the bottom of a grand stairway. “Do you need an explanation why not telling her who you were was a really shitheel thing to do?”

“No,” Foggy sighed. “I got it, thanks.” He folded his arms over his knees and propped his chin on them, staring out over the abandoned ballroom. “You think there’s any coming back from this?”

“With Elektra? Maybe, with a lot of work.”

“This wasn’t my idea. I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’ve already hurt your sister and you don’t need to listen to me. It’s just that.” He sighed again. “This wasn’t my idea.”

“It wasn’t hers either.”

“No?” Prince Franklin leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “What a royal mess.”

Matt snorted. That shouldn’t have been funny. “What did you think was going to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you trying to drive her off? Because that was something you do to someone you want gone. You have no idea how much she prepared to meet you, and she didn’t even get a single second to prove it.”

“Ugh, stop, I can’t feel any lower.”

“Look, I’m just a poor kid from Hell’s Kitchen. I don’t know anything about this stuff, so marrying for politics—it’s just beyond me. But did you even want to meet her? Could you see yourself marrying her?”

A pit opened in Matt’s stomach at the question, because he didn’t know which answer would have been the worse one.

Prince Franklin rubbed his face. “Of course I could marry her. She’s amazing. I’ve only known her for a short time and I can see that. Maybe I could even love her. But if it were up to me, if I could listen to my heart…” He didn’t continue, but the back of his hand swept gently over the back of Matt’s, and that simple touch of skin made something in his chest clench—the rightness, the desire for more. Foggy laced their fingers together. “When my heart says this, what do I do?”

Matt swallowed, but couldn’t make himself let go of the prince’s hand. Talk about a royal mess. “Foggy…I don’t know. She’s my sister, and you’re the—”

“I know, Matt. It’s not the first time I wished I wasn’t, but. Right now? I really wish I wasn’t.”

Suddenly, one of Elektra’s maids burst in and pulled up short at the sight of them. She was breathing hard.

“Milly, are you alright?”

“Your Highness,” she said, nearly hyperventilating. She pointed behind her. “There’s. There's—” She said, one hand going to her mouth and the other one to her middle, like she was going to vomit from alarm. Matt dropped Foggy’s hand. 

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” Foggy demanded. Milly shook her head. “Come on, spit it out.”

“I can’t!”

“Your prince commands you!” Foggy stated, which—okay, Matt was an American and also had capital-I issues with authority, but that was surprisingly hot.

“Karen’s kissing the Lady Elektra in the jam pantry!”

Foggy stopped like his batteries had popped out, but before Matt could shake him or ask something like how many pantries did Foggy even have, footsteps thundered into the hall, and then skidded, and then: “Milly, _don’t_ —” Karen started before freezing. “Your highness,” she said, her voice cool and tight. 

Foggy stood. “Is it true?” His voice was equally tight. 

Karen’s chin was held high. “Is what—”

“It’s true.” Elektra stepped out from behind Karen. “I’d say I’m sorry, Your Highness, but I’m not.” She took Karen’s hand, full of defiance. 

Matt gulped. 

“And what about you?” Foggy asked Karen. 

“I’ll resign if I have to,” she said, chin tilting up even further. “I love her.”

Foggy nodded and folded back down onto the stairs. Then he put his head down on Matt’s shoulder and started to laugh.

“Wait,” Elektra said suspiciously. “Did you and my brother—” She stopped, because Matt’s hand had slipped into Foggy’s, an automatic response to the sound of his laughter. “Oh, I’m going to make your life _hell_ ,” she said, her voice full of glee, affection, and bloodlust. For Elektra, that combination was exactly the formula for forgiveness. 

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Milly wailed softly. 

“No one does, but you should probably cover your eyes now,” Matt told her, curling an arm around Foggy’s shoulders and pulling him in for a kiss.


	11. Matt/Foggy. They share the Kingpin Title

There’s one question everyone has about the Karen’s bosses: which one of them’s the bitch.

That’s also the question that will get you most quickly and most prejudicially put in the ground, so while the guy who asked the question—who should know better—is still snickering, Karen gets his arm so far up behind his back he’s lifting up on his toes while being bent nearly double at the waist.

“Turk, I like you,” she says, trying to keep the boredom out of her voice. “I really do. But you make it hard by being so stupid sometimes.”

“Alright alright!” Turk squawks, just as the elevator door dings open at the penthouse level. “Jeez, you got a wide-on for them too or something?”

Karen rolls her eyes and tucks her pistol between his legs, where even an off-centre shot would make him bleed out. That location also has the added benefit of being right by his balls and anyone in possession of such idiotically delicate organs will freeze up like a deer in headlights if you so much as threaten them. “Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of stupid I mean.” When she flicks off the safety, she makes sure he can feel her thumb moving against his thigh.

“Fuck, woman, you’re crazy!” Turk yelps.

“Good evening, Mr Barrett.” Turk freezes and cranes his head up to verify that he is, in fact, totally screwed.

There is no reason why Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson should strike fear into the hearts of men. They’re only on the tall side of average and their wealth is subtly worn. They’re not even posturing in that chest-out stance that men use when they want you to notice at the size of their pecs or the bulge of their cocks.

They’re hanging out in the elevator’s foyer just like a couple of guys, not putting on their power, not waiting for the elevator doors to reveal them like gods. Just a couple of guys talking.

Karen gives up her grip on Turk’s arm and his femoral artery and shoves him forward. “Evening Mr. Murdock. Mr. Nelson,” she says, tucking her pistol away and straightening her jacket.

“Sure, _now_ you’re all ladylike,” Turk mutters, rubbing his wrist. Mr. Murdock’s face twists like he’s trying not to laugh.

“Why don’t you come in,” Mr. Nelson says, and makes Turk jump with a friendly hand on his back. “Would you like a drink?

"I’m in a fancy apartment with a bunch of white folk, and I’ve been nearly shot once already. No thank you.”

Mr. Murdock spreads his hands at Karen. “I said to be nice. Did he really need a shooting?”

Karen shrugged. “He asked which one of you bent over for the other one. I took initiative.”

Ah, that was probably mean, Karen thinks, as Murdock goes iceberg still and Turk’s face turns a terrified grey.

But Mr. Nelson’s snorting laughter breaks the moment into a million pieces and shoots Turk a reassuring smile. “You can own a quarter of Manhattan, you can have half the state’s government on a string, they’ll still care more about the bedroom than the boardroom.”

“Hey, it’s not just me, you know,” Turk explains, spreading his hands innocently. “It’s just…”

Karen snorts gently. She knows. She’s spent almost a year now, three steps behind and one step to the side of Nelson and Murdock. Watching for weakness, watching for threats. Just watching. 

Matt Murdock has the posture and the build of a bridge girder but a bad habit of putting one hand in his back pocket, which ruins the line of his suit but puts his ass on display. The curve of his smile is wicked and sharp, and there’s an edge in his voice. A cliff edge, waiting for the unsuspecting and the foolhardy. And yet, even though his eyes don’t work, his head is ever tipped towards the sound of his partner’s voice.

Foggy Nelson, on the other hand, has his jackets tailored extra-square, because underneath he’s got the rounded shoulders of a bookworm, and he hopelessly telegraphs his feelings with the set of those shoulders. Like right now. He’s curled right into his partner’s space in every way but physically. His smile is warm and genuine, but his blue eyes can go flat and deadly, eloquent in its promises of suffering when he’s crossed.

New York’s never seen a partnership like this. It thinks in terms of top dogs and underlings; it doesn’t have a model for sharing at this level of power. Smart. Strong. Sure. Nelson and Murdock trade back and forth like a double act, and for simple people who think power is just the biggest gun or the meanest crew or the most money, sometimes it’s too much to understand. A type of commitment too small and too vast to be comprehended.

“So if you had to put money on it, what would be your bet?” Mr. Murdock says, taking a seat on the leather sofa and crossing his legs. Mr. Nelson presses a glass of scotch into his hand, which makes Mr. Murdock purse his lips at him in a softly-blown kiss. 

“Bet on what?”

“Does Mr. Nelson fuck me or do I fuck him?”

Karen takes a seat at a side table and continues watching.

“Nuh uh, man. I may be just a street hustler but I know how to spot a trap,” Turk says, lip curled. Mr. Nelson puts a glass of scotch in front of him too, face amused. Turk ignores it. 

“This isn’t the time for false modesty, Mr. Barrett,” Mr. Murdock says. “We had Mr. Castle up for a drink last night. We’d heard he’s the man with the streets under his control.”

“Now, come on. No one’s got _all_ the streets—” Turk interrupts.

“Imagine our surprise when he couldn’t tell us a single thing we didn’t already know about street-level tactics.” Murdock smiles his switchblade smile.

Turk gulps. “What did you do with him?”

Mr. Nelson, perched on the back of the sofa and playing with Mr. Murdock’s hair, smiles over his shoulder. “We gave him to Karen.”

Turk turns warily in his chair and looks at her. She finishes scrubbing the dried blood off her flick knife and folds it up delicately. “Third Quarter Bonus,” she says sweetly, and Turk turns his back on her, even more warily.

“Frank is—was—is a doer, not a thinker, but he did alright,” Turk protests, twisting in his seat like it’s got spikes.

“Which brings me back to the topic of false modesty. You’re the thinker, aren’t you? Frank was all firepower but you’re the brainpower. You know everyone, and you know what they’re doing any given day of the week. You know what they want, even if you don’t know how they’ll move next. And you sent Frank out there to shake it all up or to keep it all calm. He was your right arm and he didn’t even know it. That's—” Mr. Murdock sounds enraptured, and Karen’s only ever heard that tone of voice when he’s talking with Mr. Nelson. “Majestic.”

Turk gulps again and looks around, then he exhales, lowers his shoulders, and sits back in his chair. 

“Alright then, gangsta” he says, voice completely calm now. He reaches for the scotch and takes a steady drink. “Let’s talk business.”

Mr. Murdock chuckles merrily, and Mr. Nelson, still leaning against the back of the sofa, gently turns Mr. Murdock towards him by the jaw. “What do you say?”

“I’m Matt Murdock and I’m wrong and I owe Foggy three-quarters of a million dollars,” Mr. Murdock parrots dreamily. He gets savagely kissed again as a reward.

“Oh, man,” Turk mutters, looking everywhere but at them.

“Are you uncomfortable, Mr. Barrett? Does this affect your wager?” Mr. Nelson asks.

“Not really.”

“But you have an opinion, don’t you?”

“Sure, I’ve got the spread,” Turk replies. He drinks the last of the scotch. “Maybe if you impress me I’ll let you in on it.”

Karen lays out a cloth and starts cleaning her gun while Mr. Barrett and her bosses rebuild the city in their minds and between them with their words.

So who’s the bitch?

Give Nelson and Murdock a year, it’ll be all of New York.


	12. Matt/Foggy. First attempt at a first date

Really, the bathrobe should have been the first clue that this wasn’t going to go to plan.

“Matt?” Foggy lets the trash-bag clatter limply against his leg. Even from this distance, he smells like his bed, and also like coffee grounds.

Matt leans against the parking meter and smiles winningly. “Morning, sunshine.”

“Ha ha,” Foggy yells from the top of the stoop. “Are you okay? Is there something wrong? Is there a red underwear situation?” A couple of people passing between them at that moment freeze, swivel their heads to look at Foggy, and then continue walking as if thinking better of it. 

Right, because if there was something wrong, Matt was gonna shout it across a New York sidewalk. They need two cans and a piece of string. “Everything’s fine. Let’s go out.”

Foggy waves his hands helplessly, rattling the bag. “I’m in my slippers.”

“Then go put on something nice! I’ll wait.” Matt says. 

Foggy doesn’t move for another long beat, and then snorts.“You’re being weird,” he says, shoving the bag into the garbage bin.

Matt gestures to the picnic basket hooked over his arm. “There’s a free lunch in it.”

Foggy stares. Or Matt thinks he’s staring. He doesn’t move for a long time, shoulders slumped, jaw hanging. " _Super_ weird,“ he mutters finally, retreating into the building and leaving the door swinging after him. "I’m not changing my clothes on the step, Matt. You coming in or not?” he yells.

Giddily, Matt hightails it.

\---

“Put your phone away,” Matt says, holding out a sandwich. It’s wrapped in old-fashioned greaseproof paper and tied up with a string. It’s got sun-dried tomatoes inside. He went ten blocks out of his way to get it and it was obnoxiously expensive.

“Yeah, just a sec, it’s the office,” Foggy says, tapping rapidly.

“It’s Saturday,” Matt doesn’t whine.

Foggy’s head doesn’t even lift. “If you’re even thinking about lecturing me about a work-life balance I’m gonna sue you.”

“For what?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“Food first, legal actions later,” Matt says, popping the wrapped sandwich directly on top of Foggy’s hands, which are still clutching his phone.

After that, it actually gets quite nice. Foggy eats his sandwich and doesn’t make too much fun when Matt keeps brushing against him to unearth containers of coleslaw and half-sour pickles, then two bottles of beer from the basket, and even deigns to clink Matt’s bottle with his own with a distracted but contented, “thanks for lunch.”

“Mm-hm,” Matt hums, taking a fortifying swig and shuffling closer until Foggy leans into his side.

\---

“Matt, I want you to take a good look at the people around us,” Foggy puffs, pulling at the oars.

“Foggy, really?” Matt groans, but Foggy lays the oars down and continues. Their boat starts to list to starboard.

“Take a big whiff then—bet they all smell like bedbugs and LaGuardia,” Foggy says. “Boating in central park? This is some tourist crap, Matt, what’s gotten into you?”

“I just thought it would be nice.”

“It’s physical exercise on my day off, is what it is,” Foggy mutters, but takes up the oars again.

It’s a cliché, but you really do forget you’re in the middle of a dense, mad, buzzing city when you’re in Central Park. The sun’s a velvety warmth on Matt’s cheekbones and the cool breeze that skims the lake—well, it stinks but it’s not as bad as it could be. Foggy’s counting to himself under his breath as he rows, and Matt can hear the deliberate way he swivels the oars in the oarlocks, making each stroke count.

Matt worries his pant leg for a few long lengths, then reaches into the picnic basket at his feet and pulls out a book.

“Oh, now you get to do work?”

Matt finds the page he bookmarked earlier, and shoots Foggy a smug grin. “It’s not work.” Then he clears his throat and starts to read.

“ _Come and take notice of my every sigh,_

_O noble hearts, for Mercy can’t say no._

_My sighs, disconsolate, arise and go;_

_if not for them, suffering would make me die,_ ”

“You’re reading poetry? Oh my god, you’re being so _weird_ today,” Foggy moans, but he rows Matt gently from one end of the lake to the other, and doesn’t interrupt.

“What do you think?” Matt asks, when he runs out of poems.

“It’s nice, I guess. Never really got poetry,” Foggy puffs. He’s been nonchalantly pretending not to race a couple of school kids in the next boat over. 

Sighing, Matt shoves _La Vita Nuovo_ back under the coleslaw, slowly growing warm.

\---

When the boating’s done, the heat of the day’s bled off, and Matt cleaves tight to Foggy’s exertion-warmed body as they make their way out of the park.

Foggy’s phone buzzes in his pocket again. He swears and digs it out, sighs, and then he’s texting and walking and talking to Matt all at the same time, and Matt’s hold on Foggy’s attention is probably about to come to an end. 

One last try. “Foggy,” Matt interrupts the litany of pre-trial woes. “Can I walk you home?”

“The hell for, you’re going six blocks in the wrong direction,” Foggy mutters, still tapping at his phone, “and you can’t come up for coffee, I’ve got this deposition that’s been _oh my giddy aunt this was a date_.” Foggy jerks like he’s been cattle-prodded, the infernal phone spinning out of his hand. 

Matt lunges, and it lands in his palm with a tidy little slap. He waggles it, out of Foggy’s reach. “I feel like maybe I shouldn’t give it back to you,” Matt jokes. “Maybe then you’ll pay attention to me then.”

“What the fuck,” Foggy says blankly.

“Yeah, that took you way too long to figure out,” Matt says, trying for a pitying tone, but he just sounds playful. “Do you need to sit down while you reboot?”

They find a rust- and pigeon dropping-speckled cafe table, and Foggy sits down across from him with his head thrust forward on his neck like if he peers hard enough Matt will make sense. “What the actual fuck!”

“What tipped you off, the picnic basket? The poetry on the lake?” Why is he stifling laughter? Maybe it’s because making Foggy’s gears grind has been Matt’s number one hobby since he was nineteen. Maybe it’s because the little voice that always whispered to him to jump off that building or to swing at that thug or flirt with that unattainable girl is now whispering to him: “No plan. Huge stakes. Do it anyway.”

“Matt! What the fuck, Matt!”

“You know I love you, Foggy,” Matt says, easily and matter-of-factly. Foggy’s inhale is shocked. “But I also think I _like_ like you.”

“What are you, twelve?” Foggy says, the bewilderment in his voice bleeding into amusement.

Matt rolls his eyes, using the whole range of motion of his neck. “Oh my god, would you take this seriously?”

“Seriously?” Foggy snorts, “After the total farce of today, Matt, you want me to…god, you’re lucky you’re cute.”

Well, it’s not a kick in the teeth. “You think I’m cute?”

“You’re the worst,” Foggy says, and pushes away from the table. Now, Matt’s little voice takes about a second and a half to panic, but then Foggy’s hand is soft on his jaw and Foggy’s lips are soft on his forehead. “The _worst.”_

“Okay, but when you say the worst…” But Foggy’s walking away, and now Matt does start to panic a bit, until Foggy stops at the hot dog cart and comes back with a bottle. When he cracks the top, carbonation and cane sugar fizzle over the back of Matt’s throat.

“It’s one of those bougie colas. No corn syrup.”

“Okay?”

Foggy shoves something into the bottle and holds it out for Matt to touch.

Two straws. Matt can’t fight his smile, and leans in.

Foggy’s hair brushes Matt’s face as they drink, and after a bit of tussling, their fingers interlace to keep the bottle from tipping.

The breath Foggy exhales, when most of the cola is gone, tastes sweet and intimate as a kiss, but he stops Matt’s shoulder with his hand when Matt leans all the way over the table for more.

“Walk me home?” Foggy’s voice is breathy and so inviting. 

“Sure, just as soon as I—” Foggy stops him again.

“I don’t kiss on the first date.”

Matt makes a face. “That is _not_ true.”

“Yes it is! Okay, it’s almost true.” Foggy says, off Matt’s expression.

“It’s a lie. Ipso facto, stop protesting and let me—” He leans in again and Foggy all but leaps back from the table. “What? Is it my breath?”

But Foggy’s coming around to his side of the table and lacing their fingers together. It’s even better without the ice-cold bottle between them. “If this was a date, then walk me home. Kiss me on the doorstep. Come on Murdock, don’t half-ass it.”

“Which part of today makes you think I’m not whole-assing it?

"Point.”

“So, can I call you tomorrow morning and ask you for a second date?”

Foggy laughs and pulls their bodies together, not kissing or moving, just seeming to be looking at Matt from this new close-up position, their clasped hands between them. Whatever he sees he must like, because it’s been a straight decade of Matt keeping himself alive by the warmth of Foggy’s voice, but even in all that time, Matt’s never heard him sound this affectionate. “Show some initiative. Call me from the sidewalk.”


	13. Matt/Foggy. Give them Something to Talk About

_Laugh just a little too loud_

When he caught the first whisper of it, Matt all but shoulder-checked Foggy into their broom closet office and locked the door after.

“Alright, you’ve got my attention,” Foggy said, straightening his tie. “What’s up?”

“I overheard some of the associates talking. They think we're—” Matt wiped his mouth and swallowed hard. “Foggy, they think we’re dating.”

He braced himself for anger, outrage, disgust. Instead, Foggy burst out laughing.

“Oh my god, get a life. Not you, Matt. Them,” Foggy said, grabbing Matt by the shoulders. “Let ‘em talk. I don’t care.”

“You don’t _care?_ ” Foggy made a confused, shoulder-shruggy noise. “No, of course,” Matt said. “I don’t care either.”

After that, Matt had to force himself to keep his senses trained on the conversation he was having and not the ones happening everywhere else—behind his back, in the next room, on the next floor. You’d have thought that every other lawyer and paralegal and administrator in the building had nothing else on their desks other than the question of whether the two weird interns on the twelfth floor were a couple.

In Foggy’s words, they needed to get a life.

Matt tried to ignore it.

_Stand just a little to close_

One Thursday, Matt slumped against the inside of the broom closet after tailing one of the senior associates to a court appearance. The associate was nice enough, and listening to her work was amazing, but she needed to eat after and she wanted to _talk_ , so lunch had been more of a cross-examination with incidental BLT.

Matt cracked his neck, hung up his suit jacket to air out his slightly anxiety-sweat-damp shirt, and tried to find Foggy in the building. After a moment, he heard a familiar laugh from the coffee point one floor down.

“Look, it’s not like we don’t all think Murdock’s a legit snack,” Jeff the accountant was saying, stirring creamer into his mug, and Matt’s feet suddenly wouldn’t carry him any further. "To be honest, I think most people would be happy for you, and then probably jealous of you.“ The other people making coffee all made noises of agreement.

"Still doesn’t make it true,” Foggy said crisply. Matt’s shoulders slumped. Wait, why did they do that?

“So does that mean he’s fair game?” That came from Donna, the quietest, most mouselike paralegal, and for a few minutes the conversation turned to good-natured ribbing of her hidden mercenary streak.

Matt chose that moment to follow his cane around the corner, faking a startle when Foggy called his name.

“How did it go?” he pounded Matt on the shoulder, as Matt felt for the coffee pot and accepted the mug Jeff put on the counter by his elbow.

“It was great,” Matt said honestly. “The ADA was trying so hard to play it like. Uh. Like…”

Foggy’s hand was resting on the back of Matt’s neck.

“Like what, Matt?” Donna said, chin resting on her hand. But Donna’s question hardly registered. It wasn’t like Foggy hadn’t touched him there before, but in front of all these people? Was it his imagination, how the warmth felt like it was spreading along his shoulders and down his back? Or how the weight of it was magnificent and grounding— bracketing him, holding him fast.

“Uh, I think I left an important document in my broom closet—I mean office. Excuse me. ”

“That was weird,” Foggy said, not sounding at all weirded out. “Okay, see you guys.”

\--- 

The four years of his and Foggy’s friendship really was a long time to plan revenge on someone, Matt thought, a few weeks later. That had to be the reason Foggy was doing this to him—maybe Matt had kicked Foggy’s dog once, or hit on his sister, or eaten the leftovers from his mom’s Thanksgiving dinner. Some horrible, horrible slight that deserved this kind of punishment.

Touches on the chest, arms draped around the neck, nudges with the knee when there was no table to hide it. Once, he actually hooked his fingers into the back of Matt’s belt to keep him from leaving.

Another time, in the conference room waiting for a meeting to start, Foggy put a hand on Matt’s swivel chair and turned him. “Look at me,” he ordered. Before Matt could bite out a single word, Foggy’s fingers were slipping through his bangs. “You had some fluff,” he said simply, and swivelled Matt back the other way. At the far end of the table, one of the associates elbowed the other one.

“You owe me ten bucks,” the first one whispered.

“Not until they kiss,” the other one hissed back.

If you held a gun to Matt’s head, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you what the subsequent meeting had been about. It wasn’t until he’d been trying to get to sleep that night that he realized the associate had said _until_ and not _unless_.

Matt was smarter than everyone at the firm; he was the only one who knew that it wasn’t Matt but Foggy who was the real prize. In some ways, he was even smarter than Foggy himself, because if Foggy ever bought a clue about how absolutely perfect he was, he wouldn’t ever be gifting his charms to poor orphan boys like Matt. And since Foggy was also smart, though not as smart as Matt, he had to be tweaking the noses of those busybodies who were treating his and Matt’s lives like their own personal reality TV show.

Matt grinned up at the ceiling. For Foggy, he could play along.

_Stare just a little too long_

“Morning Matt!” Foggy said, early one morning at the coffee point.

“Hi babe,” Matt murmured, distracted and still sleepy.

Jeff snorted hot coffee across the counter. “I’m okay!” he coughed, scrubbing haphazardly at his mess. “I’m fine. Carry on.”

“Milk, please,” Matt said, waggling his hand vaguely. No reaction. “Foggy, gimme the milk.”

“What? Huh? Oh right.” Foggy buried his face in the fridge, but it didn’t cool the heat of his blush. “Here you go.”

“Thanks,” Matt said, doctored his coffee, and pursed his lips in a truncated blown kiss as he passed. “Bye, Jeff.”

“You lying. Fucker,” Jeff said gleefully as soon as Matt rounded the corner.

“Maybe he got a concussion on the weekend,” Foggy muttered, scratching his head.

Okay, that was fun, Matt thought to himself.

\---

Things Matt discovered would make Foggy stammer and go flushed in the face:

1\. Straightening his tie in a crowded courthouse corridor.

2\. Stealing food from his plate when the associates who made the wager invited them to lunch. The pot was up to seventy dollars now.

3\. Waiting for him in the firm’s foyer on a particularly late night, and greeting him so sweetly when he rushed down the escalators, burbling apologies, that Noah the security guard actually made a jealous sound.

“You really didn’t have to wait for me,” Foggy said as Matt took his arm.

“I didn’t mind,” Matt said lovingly, rubbing his thumb against the skin revealed by Foggy’s rolled-up sleeve. “Night, Noah.”

“Enjoy your evening, guys,” Noah said, sighing.

“Oh jeez,” Foggy groaned, way in the back of his throat.

\--- 

“They’re all looking, you know,” Foggy said. The madness had escalated to the point where they were standing so close as to be making out against one of the windows that looked out onto the foyer. Across the foyer, Jeff and Donna and the associates with the running bet and a whole passel of other gawkers were pressed against another window, practically fogging up the glass.

Matt put his arm around Foggy’s middle, pretty sure that the audience would be able to see all five fingers of Matt’s hand sliding along Foggy’s back. “So?”

“You little exhibitionist,” Foggy teased, and everything inside Matt went abruptly hot. Foggy wasn’t supposed to have guessed that.

“Those are our colleagues and bosses, Foggy,” Matt said, trying not to choke on a sudden lust. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“You’re about half an inch away from kissing my ear, I’d say my mind is right where it needs to be.”

Matt leaned forwards and let his lips brush Foggy’s ear. “Is that permission?”

Foggy’s breath hitched at the touch, and his voice, when he spoke, was strained. “I don’t think they’ll be able to see that.”

Matt felt like he’d been ice-bucketted. Thinking it was funny to feed the rumours suddenly felt like a long time ago. “Foggy, I'm—I have to go.”

_How about love?_

“Did you guys have a fight?” Donna asked Foggy at coffee, her voice full of earnest concern.

“Nah,” Foggy said. “Just best friend stuff.”

“Oh Foggy,” Donna sighed. “It really is too late to keep pretending.”

\---

“Here, happy last quarter,” Foggy said, pressing a glass of wine into Matt’s hand and clinking it with his own. They both drank morosely as one of the partners droned on at a podium at the front of the foyer, which was all done up with tables and a dance floor.

“I’ve missed you,” Foggy said, staring straight ahead.

“You see me every day.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Everyone keeps giving me sad looks.”

They’d probably never seen them stand so far apart before, but it was their fault he had to. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t know. Just make them stop.”

“How? Kiss you in front of everyone here?”

“I don’t know,” Foggy said again. “Sure. Or in front of no one.”

Matt screwed up his nose. “What, when we’re alone?” Then he stopped, like he’d just what he said. “Wait, like when we’re alone?”

Foggy just shrugged. Matt plucked the wineglass out of his hand and placed them on a passing server’s tray. “Hey, I was drinking that.”

Most people were still listening to the partners’ neverending speech, or looking down at their phones, but when Matt grabbed Foggy by the small of the back and dragged their bodies together, he heard several gasps scattered amongst the tables.

“Foggy, I’ve wanted to—for real. Not because of—”

“What’s stopping you?” Foggy demanded, swallowing hard.

“What if _they’re_ still watching?” Jeff and the two associates were practically clutching at each other in anticipation.

“I don’t care anymore.” Foggy said firmly, and with that, Matt started to close the distance.

The burst of applause made them both jump and caused Matt to all but drop Foggy in his haste to let go. Across the foyer, Donna banged her head on Noah’s shoulder and howled softly in defeat.

“What’s that smug face for?” 

“A little dissatisfaction is good for the soul.”

“Theirs or mine?” Foggy quipped.

Matt extended his cane and started to make his way to the doors. “Theirs,” he said as he passed.

“And what about mine?” Foggy flung at Matt’s retreating back. Matt stopped. Turned. Smirked.

“Well, I’m getting out of here. You wanna come?”

Foggy’s laugh was startled and joyful, and when they walked out of the building, they were so close together, you couldn’t have wedged a rumour between them.


	14. Matt/Foggy. Foggy's Good at Boxing and Matt's Into it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is rated E.

Matt and his dad never had a motto, other than muttering about the devil when they got morose, but Matt thought maybe they should have gotten one. “This was a bad idea,” would be right at the top of the list. Or maybe, “I didn’t see this coming.” That would probably count as irony, now. 

The awkwardness between him and Foggy hadn’t started because of anything dramatic. They’d actually been getting closer—slowly, cautiously— after the big secret of Daredevil had all but blown their friendship apart. All they’d done was hug goodbye one night, and just as Matt’s brain was forming the thought “wow, Foggy smells good,” he realized how long they’d been clinging to each other and how close they’d come to kissing.

“Matt,” Foggy gasped, pulling back in surprise, then pressing back in.

“I—can’t,” Matt choked out. They were still rebuilding, still learning each other. Letting this happen—it would be right out of the Murdock playbook, and it didn’t matter how much he wanted it, it would be the worst possible move. He’d earned that insight with literal blood and literal tears and this time, he wasn’t going to throw the lesson away. “Foggy, we can’t. Not now.”

“You don’t want this?”

“I do. You have no idea, Foggy, I do,” Matt promised. “But we're—we’ve just started to…”

“Yeah,” Foggy said, wistful. He pounded Matt on the shoulder. “Good thinking.”

After that, being around Foggy was like having his chest in a vise. He wanted Foggy with an intensity that could short out electronics. 

“Come boxing with me,” Matt blurted, when the awkwardness was so bad it felt like a third person in the room. “Saturday night. Fogwell’s will be empty. I’ll teach you.”

“Really?”

Matt nodded. It was perfect. Foggy would bumble around the ring like an Easter ham on a broken roller-skate and Matt’s out-of-control ardour would be cooled for another week. “Really.”

That was the plan, anyway. 

House Murdock: We didn’t think this through.

\---

“No more skipping,” Foggy wheezed, hands on knees, rope puddled around his ankles. “Please god, if you love me, no more skipping.”

“Just another two minutes,” Matt said, throwing in a showy triple-under to make Foggy swear at him. He wasn’t going to respond to the “if you love me” comment.

\---

“Jab.” Foggy’s glove hit Matt’s pad with a perfect, snappy _paf_ sound. “Good. Cross.” The way Foggy’s hips turned, bringing the strength of his back into the punch, was textbook. Clean and powerful. “Jab. Jab,” he moved the pad, and instinctively, Foggy shifted so that his chest was facing it, maximizing the efficiency his muscles. “Cross. Cross. Okay, now in fours. One, two, one, two.”

“So how much do I suck at this?” Foggy puffed, when they were done, wiping his forehead with his t-shirt hem and chugging water.

“Surprisingly little,” Matt admitted.

“Surprisingly, huh?” Matt could hear the grin. 

Matt crossed his legs and shrugged.

\---

“It’s not about making the bag move,” Matt instructed, lining Foggy up in front of the heavy bag, “it’s about endurance. You’ll get tired, and then you’ll get sloppy. The point is to make your last hit as pretty as your first hit. Two minutes. Go.”

“Got it, coach,” Foggy said, attention already on the bag. He settled into his stance and went at it. Matt blinked. Foggy was hitting the bag metronome steady and precise as a pile-driver. He pivoted on the balls of his feet, he led with the knuckles of his index and middle fingers. He was a natural.

This was a disaster. Maybe it was time to skip the rest of the drills and just chuck Foggy into the ring.

\---

“Now, the important thing is not to panic,” Matt soothed. Foggy’s head was packaged up like a bone china teapot being shipped overseas.

“No,” Foggy said, muffled by his mouthguard. “I think the important thing is not to break my face.”

Matt rolled his eyes. “No one’s face is getting broken.”

“I don’t know, Matt, isn’t face-breaking kind of your thing?”

“Do you _want_ to go back to skipping rope?”

In response, Foggy pulled back his glove and took a swipe at Matt at about one twentieth the speed Matt knew he could hit, and turned the mock punch into a hug that nearly bore Matt down to the canvas. “Noooooo.”

Matt bopped him on the back of the head, pulling Foggy’s padded forehead to his sweaty one. “Come on, champ, get ‘em up.”

Here’s the thing about beginning boxers. They might have good hands, but adrenaline saps agility, and that’s what—literally—trips them up. Matt expected that Foggy would bob and weave theatrically like in the old boxing movies, but that was energy-sapping and not actually useful for getting out of the way of an incoming glove.

When tiredness kicked in, everything would go. His spine would bend, his arms would drop, his heels would sag into the mat, his punches as coordinated as a child having a tantrum.

“Ready?” Matt held out his gloves, and Foggy bumped them.

\---

An hour later, Foggy had Matt on the ropes. Not in terms of the fight—they weren’t actually competing, just popping at each other a little, and then Matt would show Foggy something new, and then they’d work it into the sparring—but in terms of Matt’s plan to make Foggy look silly.

“Getting tired, old man?” Foggy teased, bouncing on the balls of his feet and knocking his gloves together.

“I’m two months older than you,” Matt said, giving Foggy a left cross that was _almost_ not telegraphed at all. Foggy dodged it anyway.

“Exactly, I’ve got youth on my side.” Foggy said. An obvious right jab that Matt batted away easily turned out to be cover for a left hook that smacked Matt in the side of the face. It didn’t have any real power behind it, but it had taken Matt completely by surprise. He startled like Foggy had flicked him in the nose.

“I’m good at this, aren’t I?” Foggy preened.

“You really are,” Matt said, faintly chagrined. “Freak.”

“Oh wow, you got a real nerve, throwing that word around. Hey Matt, you wanna box for real?”

“For real how?”

“Like I’m someone at your level. Like you’re actually trying to beat me.”

For a second, Matt couldn’t even speak. “Foggy, I’m not gonna pummel you for fun!” Although, if he broke Foggy’s nose, the problem of them trying not to fall into bed together wouldn’t be a problem anymore.

“Okay, 50% then. Box like you're—I don’t know, box like you’re seventeen.”

“I was still pretty good at seventeen, Foggy.”

“There’s that Murdock arrogance,” Foggy said approvingly. “Show me what you got, then.”

“No, Foggy, I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Then defend yourself!” A clean right jab made Matt’s head snap back. “Oh fuck! Shit, are you okay? Jesus Christ, Matt, I thought you’d catch that one!”

Matt sniffled blood, then wiped it on the back of his glove. “Put 'em up, Nelson.”

\---

Foggy lasted about four minutes, which was three minutes and fifty seconds longer than Matt had given him in his head. And it wasn’t like Matt was really trying to win a match here, he was just going to give Foggy maybe one half to three-quarters more than he could handle and see how he managed.

Foggy managed like a sex dream. Matt knew because he’d had this one.

By the end, they were both dripping sweat. Foggy still had his hands in front of his face, valiantly deflecting Matt’s blows, but his back was against the post and there was no way he was getting out of it.

“Okay,” Foggy said, nearly breathless. He spat out the mouth guard and ripped off the thick foam boxing helmet. “You win. Gimme a towel so I can throw it in.”

“What was that?” Matt laughed, putting one glove to his ear. “I didn’t hear you.”

“You win, Matt.” Matt stopped, and felt Foggy’s panting breath on his mouth. “Matt, you win.”

The air was thick with honest sweat, but under that, Foggy’s exertion-warm body was thrumming with something else.

Matt’s throat clicked. “What do I win?”

Foggy licked his lips. “What do you want?”

Matt ripped his gloves off with his teeth and took Foggy by the back of the neck. “You.” They crashed back into the post, Matt’s incisors scraping along the inside of Foggy’s lip. “I want you.” 

“Wait, wait,” Foggy pulled away from the kiss and shoved his glove against Matt’s chest when Matt chased him with his lips. “What about—” 

The plan. “Oh, right,” Matt said. His hands were moving shakily over Foggy’s jaw, but who knew if the shakes were from exertion or from Foggy. “Good call,” he murmured, stealing a last kiss that was sweeter than the entire world. 

Foggy keened into Matt’s mouth. “Fuck it,” he said decisively, and folded to his knees. Matt felt the breath whoosh out of his lungs. “We’re grown-ups. We’ll deal with it. I wanna blow you.”

Matt wanted to ask “are you sure?” but Foggy gloves were bracketing him by the hips and Foggy’s teeth were pulling hopefully at the waistband of his shorts. So instead, Matt just pushed at the fabric until his cock sprang out—he’d been half-hard since the _skip rope,_ Jesus—and held it still for Foggy to slurp down.

Matt played with Foggy’s sweat-soaked hair as he bobbed his head and swirled his tongue and generally did his best to make Matt’s eyes roll back. And low in his throat, he was moaning like this was the best thing ever.

Foggy pulled off with a gasp and shoved his boxing glove between his spread thighs to grind on it. “Fuck, Matt.”

“Do you—” Matt swallowed hard. “Do you wanna lose the gloves?”

“No, you won, didn’t you?” Foggy said, hooking them over the ropes and then straining forward to lick a wet strip up Matt’s thigh. “To the victor go the spoils.”

Oh _fuck_.

Matt gently laced his fingers together at the back of Foggy’s head and waited for the nod. Foggy biffed him in the ass with the glove, which was basically the same thing.

Biting his lip, he carefully worked his cock into the hot, wet clutch of Foggy’s throat, and every time he pulled back, Foggy _whined_ like he was losing his favourite toy.

“You really want this, oh my god, Foggy, I can't—you're…Foggy, I’m gonna come.”

It felt too good for Matt to worry that Foggy was going to think he was a three-pump chump, and even if he did, Matt would take every opportunity given to disabuse him of the notion.

Foggy pulled off with a gasp. “Kiss me,” he ordered hoarsely, and Matt nearly bloodied his nose again swooping down to obey. “God, I already love kissing you. Now give me your come.”

Matt groaned from the tips of his toes and shoved back into Foggy’s mouth, rolling his hips into it, sweating and panting and spilling down Foggy’s throat with a shudder. He was still shaking and spurting weakly when his legs folded under him and he hit his knees, reaching for Foggy’s face again and sucking the salt off Foggy’s tongue.

“You wanna take those gloves off now?” Matt said, encircling Foggy’s wrists.

“Yeah,” Foggy said, and let Matt tug them off. He flexed his fingers, still in their wraps. “My hands are shaking.”

“That means I’m doing this right,” Matt said against his mouth. 

“You’re lippy for someone who just came like a freight train,” Foggy said. He sucked Matt’s bottom lip, raising goosebumps. “Matt, do you want to. Do I get to—”

“Do you get to what?”

“Do I get to come?”

“ _Get_ to?”

“I lost, didn’t I?”

“Oh fuck.” Matt grabbed him by both hips. Foggy pushed up on his knees and let Matt shove his shorts down. The feel of Foggy’s cock in his hand—hot, wet, and twitching—made Matt’s mouth water. “Put your hands back on the ropes,” Matt said. He wrapped both hands around Foggy’s shaft and started to stroke him, too slow to be anything but a tease.

“Why should I?” Foggy gasped. 

Matt kissed him fiercely. “Because I won.” 

Foggy shivered all over and let his head fall back against the post, and Matt took that as permission to set his teeth against Foggy’s throat while he worked his hands over Foggy’s slick shaft. Next time, he wanted Foggy’s hands on him, clawing at his back, clutching at his arms. He wanted Foggy’s fingers in his hair and in his mouth and on his skin, but for now, Matt would take him like this, his gloves propped on the ropes, sprawled out in the corner of the ring like a boxer waiting for the bell.


	15. Matt/Foggy. New Dad Shenanigans.

In terms of accessories that made Matt fascinating and irresistible, Foggy’s daughter beat out even the red glasses.

“Oh, calm down,” Matt said, kissing Foggy’s unkempt hair. “Anyone who wears a baby is going to get attention. And she’s my daughter too.” In the carrier strapped to Matt’s chest, six month old Matilda swivelled her head towards their voices, the ears of her bunny hat twitching back and forth.

Matt looked ready for a photoshoot in a magazine: smart sweater and trim jeans and his hair extra swooshy on a Saturday morning, the sunlight reflecting off his stupid glasses and his grin showing his stupid white teeth, walking along confidently behind his cane with Matilda’s head resting peacefully on his chest.

In contrast, Foggy looked like someone had found a dirty, sullen pile of laundry and zipped it up inside an army surplus jacket. “She doesn’t even drool on you,” he marvelled.

“She loves me,” Matt said, teeth gleaming. Matilda reached up for the shiny, and Matt kissed her little hand.

“Then she must _hate_ me,” Foggy muttered. His head was still spinning from tiredness and he had a twitch in his eye that wasn’t going away.

“If she does, then I’ll just have to love you more,” Matt said, bending over Matilda’s head to tug Foggy into a deep kiss. He smacked his lips when he pulled back. “You didn’t brush your teeth this morning.”

It wasn’t good to expect a blind person to divine the meaning behind his silence, but Foggy’s face was burning too hard for him to talk.

When Matt was home, he was an amazing dad. He cheerfully changed diapers, albeit with a clothes-pin on his nose. He made Matilda giggle so hard Foggy worried she’d spit up on him. Matt sang to her while he washed her hair in the sink, and he did sit ups while cuddling her little dumpling body into his chest.

But that was when Matt was home. He had a law firm to keep running and a city to protect on top of that. Foggy knew it killed him to be away. He’d phone three, four, five times a day to listen to Matilda babble, and some evenings he’d slam into the apartment nearly winded, like he’d sprinted up the stairs to be home faster.

But never minding Matt’s intentions, Foggy had Matilda for the other twenty hours of the day, and he couldn’t even let the apartment get messy unless he wanted Matt to slip on a dirty onesie and crack open his head.

So there Matt was, looking even more fashion model than normal and having to sidestep people of all genders who cooed they just wanted to eat Matilda up but were looking at him when they said it. And Foggy…had eyes. He knew he looked about as bad on the outside as he felt on the inside.

“I’m going into this shop,” Foggy said tightly. “Stay here. Don’t get…remarried.”

As he stalked into the grocery store, he heard Matt singsong to Matilda. “What the hell does that mean? He’s crazy, yes he is, Daddy’s gone banana-pants.”

Foggy shopped in a daze, going by the colours of the labels more than anything. Cooking this week would be an adventure, he guessed. When he trudged back out, laden down with bags, three separate people were touching his family. Two were trying to get Matilda to grab their finger. One had their hand on Matt’s arm.

The getting remarried joke was _supposed_ to have been a joke.

Instead of saying something snide, Foggy just dropped his bags and collapsed on a nearby bench to wait out the flirting. Matilda started to fuss and strained in her carrier towards him. He waved back.

“Matt,” the one stroking Matt’s arm whispered, “some homeless guy’s staring at you.”

“Is this homeless guy wearing an inside-out army jacket?” Matt whispered back. Foggy looked down at himself. _Dammit._

“This is my partner Foggy,” Matt said, lacing their fingers together and kissing the back of his hand.

The way all three of their faces fell was almost as good as eight hours’ sleep. Almost.

That night, after Matilda fell asleep, Matt cuddled up behind Foggy and kissed his shoulder. “I love you.”

“I know,” Foggy mumbled.

“I love coming home to you. I love how you smell like the baby.”

“That’s not the baby, Matt, that’s poop and milk.”

“I love it anyway.”

“You love that I smell of poop?”

“I love that you work so hard to take care of Matilda and me and don’t you dare think that I’d ever trade it for someone with their jacket on the right way out.”

That was some barefoot-and-pregnant bullshit, but he sort of got it. Matt had always been starved for a family at home, and now he had one. Foggy was giving him one. “I’m too tired for your romantic crap, Murdock,” he said, but he was smiling into the pillow.

“You sure about that?” Matt was stroking Foggy’s chest, and he was heading south.

“Seriously?”

“Can’t I be attracted to my baby’s daddy?” Matt inched down the bed and pulled Foggy’s boxers down.

“It was the jacket, wasn’t it?” Foggy panted.

Matt nipped Foggy’s hipbone. “Mmm, I could feel all your seams. How could you expect me to control myself?”

Foggy had been worried that he wouldn’t be able to come no matter what Matt did, because of the exhaustion Foggy hadn’t been able to shake for weeks now, but he shouldn’t have. As soon as Matt’s lips ran down his length once, twice, three times, a wail came from the baby’s room.

They groaned in unison, but Matt pushed him down with a kiss, and went to deal with their daughter.

The next morning, Foggy startled awake, nearly hyperventilating because the sun was fully up and no one was crying and had Matilda stopped breathing in the night? When the pounding receded from his ears he could hear talking in the kitchen. Tripping out of the bedroom, he saw Matt balancing Matilda on his hip and a suitcase by the door.

“Are you kicking me out?”

Matt approached him with a soft, loving smile, and Foggy felt more of the panic melt away. They kissed until Matilda started to fuss at being squashed. “Your parents are going to pick you up from the station.”

Foggy’s parents had retired to Tarrytown the year before, where they spent their days in a bungalow with enough room for a smokehouse in the back. “Matt, I can’t just leave—”

“I just finished a trial, and everything’s quiet. I’ll take a few days off. Jessica and Trish can patrol.”

“Matt,” Foggy huffed, but Matt held up a finger.

“Karen will bring you back on Friday.”

“I’m going for a _week_?”

“You’re exhausted and pissed off. You need a break.”

“I am _not_ —” Foggy said hotly.

Matt kissed him quiet. “You are, and that’s okay. It’s been hard on you and I haven’t been helping. Take a break.”

Foggy pressed his lips together. He thought about sleep, and showers, and reading law journals, and eating his meals sitting down, and drinking beer. Oh god, beer.

Matilda stared at him with eyeballs the size of her whole head. “But this little face,” Foggy whined, stealing his daughter from Matt and kissing her downy scalp all over.

“We can FaceTime whenever you want. But I want you on the two-thirty out of Grand Central.”

In Tarrytown, Foggy slept. He smoked some ham hocks with his mom. He read an entire amicus brief in the bath. He cooked a three-course dinner for his parents and let them tease him about the son who had to phone home freshman year asking how to grill a steak.

He got Matt and Matilda on FaceTime seven times the first day, four times the second day, and only twice on the third day. By the fifth day, he didn’t call until after nine.

“Nope, doing fine,” Matt promised, that last time, and Foggy grinned at the piano-wire-tightness he tried to keep out of his voice. It was very familiar.

Karen came up and they went to a bar and got relentlessly hit on, which was a double boost Foggy’s ego—once when he got approached and once when he said he was taken. On the train back, he flicked through the photos of Matilda and Matt on his phone, and willed the train to go faster.

“What’s the over/under that he cracked?” Karen asked lightly, as they neared Foggy’s building.

“No bet,” Foggy chuckled, and walked a little faster. He heard crying as soon as they hit his floor. “Oh boy.”

“Shoulda bet,” Karen muttered. They took off jogging.

Foggy threw open the apartment door and was hit by the smell of sour milk. Matt was at the kitchen table with Matilda in the crook of his arm, trying to feed her through her screams. He was in shorts and one of Foggy’s old dress shirts, and he had strained carrots with tofu in his hair. “You’re home,” he nearly sobbed. His eyes were a little manic. 

“I’m home,” Foggy said and tried to find a clean spot to kiss. He picked Matt’s ear. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” Matt answered on autopilot. “Nearly fine.”

Foggy licked his lips, eyeing Matt’s bare legs and shaky smile. Matilda had stopped crying and had shoved the rest of her food in with her hands.

It was crazy. Matt was the most beautiful man in New York and Foggy knew all his looks: winning in court in a sharp suit, cuddling on the couch with his sweats tucked into his socks, naked and panting and spattered in come. _This_ look shouldn’t have made any sense, but Foggy started to get hard in his pants anyway.

Matt sniffed the air and his expression shaded to confused.

“Why don’t I,” Karen said, her hands folded together like an angel but her smile mischievous, “take Matilda to the park?”

“I love you,” Foggy hissed at her as she wiped Matilda’s face, strapped her into a carrier and breezed out the door before anyone could protest. Foggy certainly wasn’t planning to. “You are unfairly hot like this,” he said, when the door closed.

Matt tugged on his hair, wincing when it went squish. “Like what?”

“Like the father of my child,” Foggy said.

“I’ve always been the father of your child.”

“Yeah, but…what was it you said? Why can’t I be attracted to my baby’s daddy?”

“Oh.” Matt blushed. “I can work with that.” Foggy kissed Matt hard and pulled him towards the shower, unbuttoning his stained shirt the entire way. 


	16. Foggy/Marci. Matt/Marci. Four Ways of Looking at Jealousy.

_1\. Antipathy (a deep-seated feeling of dislike)_

Matt Murdock and Marci Stahl failed to get along with each other from the starting bell. Everyone within a four block radius knew this.

Matt Murdock would also, in the lowest strata of his soul, where he kept things like the smell of his father’s hair and the illustrations from his favourite picture books, never forgive Foggy Nelson for being the kind of guy who could fall in love with someone who hated his best friend.

No one could know this.

But Marci kept _being there,_ kept reminding Matt that he’d done it again—he’d put his hopes into someone who he trusted to have a _rudimentary_ understanding of loyalty and that it all went wrong. Again.

So the first time he hit on his best friend’s girlfriend, it’s a coin flip on who he was punishing.

“You wish,” Marci snorts, scooping up all her books and swanning off, even before Foggy gets back from the coffee run.

Foggy stops in the doorway, a cardboard tray of coffees in his hand. “Where’d she go?”

Matt shrugs, and holds out his hand for a coffee.

He should feel ashamed about making her uncomfortable, but he doesn’t. It’s like he can breathe again.

The first time Marci runs her foot up his leg under the table, he nearly takes a chunk out of his own lip.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” she coos.

“Nothing,” Matt coughs and sputters and wipes his face and has to fight not to scream.

It carries on like this, this shoving match, whenever Foggy’s not around. He stands too close to her. She flips her hair right into his face.

She shows up late one night, when Foggy’s at his parents’ place, and Matt answers the door without a shirt on. “You aren’t going to win.” They were always heading here—Matt doesn’t even remember how it all started but he knows he wants to witness her defeat.

He cocks his head to one side. “So why are you here?”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“Go ahead and try, if you think you can.” Matt moves aside to let her pass.

She walks in.

_2\. Empathy (feeling the feelings of another)_

At the beginning of second year, a new girl transfers into their program. She also moves into the room directly above Matt and Foggy.

Marci Stahl’s got a voice like a crash cymbal, all sharp brassy vowels and directness, and she never met a point she could concede gracefully—in class, or like now, on the phone to her sister.

“No, I’m not going to date him, he goes by Foggy, for god’s sake” she snaps, and it sounds like she and the phone are underneath a pillow. “Because I’m here to get a law degree, Jeannie, not my M-R-S.” There’s no danger there. No one who goes for the throat like Marci Stahl could ever be accused of being in school to snare anything but a favourable verdict. More sub-pillow moaning from upstairs. “But he’s _so_ _cute_. Unfairly cute.”

Matt listens as Marci describes Foggy from the top of his head (blonde hair) to his sneakers (decorated in sharpie). He actually learns some things. Like Foggy has an eyebrow ring, and lips made for kissing.

Matt’s hands skate off the pages of his textbook, his brain lit up with wondering, imagining the plush press of Foggy’s lips against his skin. His heart does a barrel roll.

“Marce, just make up your mind,” Jeannie says upstairs. Matt has to strain to hear her over the long-distance phone line. “I mean, if you ask me, he sounds like a bro, and you hate bros.”

“He’s not!” Matt bristles along with Marci, and finds himself nodding along as she sets her sister straight.

“So you do like him.”

Marci doesn’t say anything for a long time. “He makes my heart feel like a rollercoaster,” she says finally, dreamily.

Matt puts a hand to his chest. Oh no.

_3\. Apathy (Lacking in interest or concern)_

It’s Friday night and they’re so drunk, sitting on the back steps of their dorm building. Matt’s cross-legged at the top, Foggy and Marci and an empty bottle of Captain Morgan sprawled like a pile of dropped laundry, her hand-wash delicates all mixed in with his sturdy permanent press.

“Marci, stop,” Foggy scolds, in a tone that pleads “oh god, do that again,” and bats her hand away from his inner thigh. “Matt’s right there.”

“Matt’s a big boy, he won’t mind.”

Matt minds. He minds so much he tastes blood. It wasn’t fair, the way she twisted Foggy around her little finger before Matt could even tell that was what she was doing. Now every minute of Matt’s life is punctured with her sharpness—sharp words, sharper intent—and he doesn’t understand how someone as soft as Foggy doesn’t realize it.

He keeps breathing, meditating a shell into being around him, a barrier that no sounds or smells or words can penetrate.

“He hasn’t said a word in half an hour. He’s probably asleep.”

She makes Foggy kiss her some more, messy and fully oblivious of anything outside the way they tangle together.

“Marci!” Foggy all but squeaks. She’s cupping him between his legs.

“What?” Cut-glass innocence. “It’s not like he can see us.”

Marci doesn’t like Matt either, and she’s not subtle. Subtlety, here as much as in debates, wastes energy better spent on grinding rivals into the dust. And straddling Foggy’s lap with her nails against his neck, what else could possibly be going on?

_4\. Sympathy (understanding between people)_

Marci’s mouth is right by Matt’s ear, but she doesn’t scream. She just takes overwhelmed breaths, small mewls, clutching at his neck.

“It’s okay, you’re safe now, ma'am,” Matt says, once they land on the roof and he retracts the line back into the billy club.

He expects her to lose her shit—scream or cry, or maybe if he’s really lucky, throw up on his shoes. But instead, she runs to the edge of the building and looks over.

“Wait—” Matt calls.

“Who were they?” Marci demands, but the men who had come at her with black bag and a silenced gun are gone. Their van had squealed down the block before Matt had gotten Marci two storeys away from street level.

“Ms. Stahl—” Matt holds out both hands.

“Hey, people who nearly died ask the questions. People with horns give the answers.”

“They work for VerdAgra’s legal department,” Matt says, and Marci smashes her fist into the building’s edge.

“You ratfucker,” she hisses, _probably_ not at Matt. “You think you can have me whacked because you couldn’t find a good argument with an atlas? Ratfucker!” She yells that last bit over the edge of the building, out into the night. “I’m arguing a case against them, and closing arguments are tomorrow,” she explains shakily.

Matt nods. "Maybe I should get you off this roof,“ he hedges, regretting that the only part of him this stupid suit reveals is his mouth, because it’s not great for the citizens he’s supposed to be guarding to realize he’s laughing. Matt’s met VerdAgra’s lead counsel. He isa _total_ ratfucker.

"Hang on, let me call my fiancé.” When the ringing stops and the line connects to Foggy’s cell phone, her voice warms perceptibly. “Hey hon. I’m safe. But I think I almost got kidnapped tonight. No, Foggybear, I’m fine. Daredevil saved me.”

Matt had been so jealous of Marci in college. Had been so certain that every loving word she said to Foggy was a jab at Matt’s twisted up feelings about her boyfriend.

Nowadays, his feelings for Foggy aren’t any less twisted up, but it’s all less…corrosive. Listening to Foggy’s rapid-fire questions about Marci’s wellbeing, and her patient answers—it just makes Matt’s heart ache a little, instead of making acid heave in his stomach. He wants someone to talk to like that. He wants a love that’s worn-in.

“Hey Red,” Marci calls. “Foggy wants to talk to you.” She holds out her phone.

Matt takes it. “Uh. Hello?”

“Are you okay?” is Foggy’s first question, before even _Is Marci still in danger_ or _How could you let this happen, Matt_.

Matt smiles without really meaning to, and has to turn away from Marci. “Yes.”

“Good. Is she okay?”

“Didn’t you just talk to her—?”

“She puts on a brave face for me, Matt. Just like you.”

Marci’s shaking a little, but her heart is steady and she doesn’t smell like tears or panicked sweat. “I think everything will be fine.”

“I love her, Matt. Keep her safe. Keep yourself safe. Come back to me, the both of you.”

There might not be a single word for the way Foggy’s voice sounds. Affectionate and anxious and practical and trusting. A love, worn-in, for Marci and for Matt both.


	17. Matt/Foggy, Matt/Everyone. Disaster man can't get off with anyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "Everyone" pairings include Matt/Brett, Matt/Danny/Luke, Matt/Colleen, Matt/Jessica

Matt grabs his head the second he wakes up, because if he doesn’t, it’s going to go rolling off the sofa and across the floor of Foggy’s new apartment.

“Morning sunshine,” Foggy croaks. He’s slumped on the edge of the sofa, smelling of alcohol and yesterday’s clothing. When he burps ominously, Matt considers if he’s got the speed to scramble out of range if Foggy blows chunks. Thankfully, all Foggy blows is a final, steadying breath. “Some party, huh?”

Christ, Matt thinks. They turned thirty last year, what were they _thinking._

Something niggles at Matt’s sloshy, demon-carousel memory. The feel of hair slipping through his fingers. Bruises squeezed around his wrists. “Foggy...did I do something…inadvisable?”

Foggy pats Matt’s leg. “Buddy, you did _everyone.”_

\---

The arithmetic is simple: Foggy leaving Chao and Benowitz to resurrect Nelson and Murdock equals goodbye six-figure salary, which equals goodbye long-term investment plan. Goodbye cocktails at Dear Irving, hello take-out pad thai.

But it’s not just goodbye high life. It’s goodbye top-notch paralegal support. Goodbye having his pick of clients. Goodbye to the security of knowing that even if he lost a trial, he could never bring the whole firm crashing down with one wrong decision or one missed deadline.

By slow and painful degrees, this means goodbye Marci. Goodbye booking fee for the little church in Foggy’s parents’ neighbourhood. Good-bye swanky Nolita apartment.

Which means hello one-bedroom Hell’s Kitchen walk-up.

\---

Due to Foggy’s history of tangling with various shades of good guys and bad guys, his housewarming party was a mix of superheroes, law enforcement, and people who routinely did the tarantella right on the line between legal and not. The party was a noisy, boozy din, and Matt was right in the middle of it, lightening his bottle of Macallan glass by steady glass.

“Don’t leave me, man,” Brett pleaded, listing heavily to starboard.

Matt curled his arms around Brett’s waist, steadying him. "Okay, Brett. I won’t.“

"It’s all criminals and weirdos in here,” Brett whispered. Well, he probably thought he was whispering. “All of Foggy’s friends are weird.”

“You’re his friend.”

“So’re you. You’re the weirdest of them all, did you know that? But man, you’re cute. What’s it like to be as cute as you? Bet you could get anyone to kiss you, couldn’t you?” One of Brett’s hands clutched Matt’s hip. The other one kneaded the nape of his neck.

Matt goggled, but then the scotch went to his head and he was kissing Brett, pulling him close, the thrill of a bad idea zinging between them.

“You wanna get out of here?” Matt breathed, when they broke apart.

“Sorry, man,” Brett said, stumbling out of Matt’s arms. “I get enough weird at work.” He tottered off, leaving Matt stinging with rejection.

\---

“I did what?” Matt moans into his hands. He’s finally sitting upright, though it was rough sailing for a few minutes there. Next to him, a mug of black coffee tests the strength of the cardboard box doing duty as Foggy’s side table.

“Oh Matt,” Foggy says drily. “Buckle in.”

\---

After three rounds of shatteringly bad tequila, Karen was resting her head on Matt’s shoulder and humming to herself. Claire and Colleen Wing were lounging against them too, making one big salt-and-lime scented cuddle-puddle.

“This is nice,” Matt sighed, letting his head gimbal around on his neck. Silky hair brushed his cheek no matter which way he leaned.

“Can I have more lime?” Colleen asked. They’d coached her through the steps of her first tequila shot not ten minutes before, and had laughed themselves nearly sick at the the adorably disgusted sounds she’d made.

“Can I have a blanket?” Karen snagged a throw with her foot and drunkenly tucked Colleen in. “Thanks. Can I have a kiss?”

Karen touched Colleen’s nose. “You are too cute for your own goddamn good,” she giggled, but gave her a peck. She must have turned imploring eyes to Claire, because suddenly Claire was leaning over him. The soft smack of her pressing her lips to Colleen’s was suddenly very loud.

“Matt?” Her voice was so sweet, roughened only a bit from the alcohol.

“You sure?” Matt asked, but he was already touching her shoulder to guide himself to her through a pleasant dizziness, and her _yes_ was lost in the space between their mouths. Suddenly, her arms flung out and squeezed his head, and she was pulling him down, their legs knocking Claire and Karen out of the way.

Matt should have protested, should have pulled back, should have asked “are you sure” again, but if he was being honest, he was happy to go down, to get lost in her scent, the newness of her body against his.

“Matt, don’t you dare,” Karen barked, ramming both arms between Colleen and Matt and wedging them apart.

“Oh come on!” Colleen bleated, and tugged at Matt again.

“Not going to happen,” Claire said crisply. “You get away from the stinky garbage man.”

“But he’s so hot,” Colleen whined, but Claire hooked one elbow under Colleen’s arm and Karen grabbed her by the other one and together they dragged her bodily off Matt.

“So’s an electric stove,” Karen said, as they dragged Colleen into Foggy’s bathroom and closed the door after with a decisive click. “We’re not letting you touch one of those either.”

\---

“Please tell me that’s it,” Matt prays.

Foggy takes a long, long drink. “Well…”

\---

Matt came back to himself on Foggy’s bed, flat on his back and sandwiched between two sets of strong thighs. Danny and Luke were sitting up against the headboard, drinking and kissing. Sort of.

Danny took a shot and sealed his lips against Luke’s, letting the liquor flow into his mouth. When Luke bent and did the same to Matt, it should have been gross, all backwash and traces of what they ate for lunch, but instead it was unbearably intimate, and he chased the taste with his tongue each time. Matt swallowed shot after shot, poured into him by Luke and Danny in turns, kisses so deep he wanted to climb inside. Wanted them to take him home and keep him, wanted to spend eternity in the space between them.

“Oh, no, hey,” Luke said, sounding awkward and apologetic, even though Matt was pretty sure he hadn’t spoken aloud. “I think you got the wrong idea here, Matt.”

\---

“Oh god…” Matt wails. Foggy pats his shoulder.

\---

“You’ve kissed everyone here,” Jones accused, shoving Matt into a row of Foggy’s overcoats and slamming the closet door behind them.

“What’s wrong, you feel left out?” Matt needed both hands on the closet rail to stay standing, reaching up behind his head to grip it, but it wasn’t hurting his game at all, if Jessica’s breath—faster than normal and pulled deep into her belly—was anything to go on.

Jessica huffed whiskey-scented derision over his face and forced his hands down and behind his back, holding both his wrists with no apparent difficulty. Before Matt could say anything, like “what”, or “please”, she pulled their mouths together with teeth-shattering force.

“Jess, oh God” Matt growled, fighting her grip, failing utterly, utterly and finding it overwhelmingly hot. “Let me touch you.”

“Earn it.” Her chuckle was smoky and smug, so Matt dipped his face into the low neckline of the terrible, booze-stained tank top she was wearing, nipping and sucking at her skin till she let go of his wrists. 

Immediately, he rucked up her tank and touched her stomach, her ribs, the valley of her spine, the edge of her bra.

“What’s wrong, you scared of boobies?” Jessica panted. Her teeth scored Matt’s lip, his jaw, his neck. “Are we in middle school?”

“God, you’re annoying,” Matt said, and shoved his hand underneath her bra. He twisted her nipple and she yowled, ripped open his shirt and _climbed_ him.

“So,” she said, legs tight around his hips and his hands holding her up by her ass. “Are we gonna fuck or what?”

Matt kissed up Jessica’s neck while she moved like she was trying to ride him standing up. “I feel like Foggy would want me to say something about bad ideas,” he panted. It made her freeze.

“Oh, right…” Jessica covered his mouth with her hand. “Foggy.” She pulled her tank top back down, gave his bare chest a stinging, but apologetic, slap, and slipped out the door. 

\---

“And that’s where I found you, half-naked and moping under my winter coats,” Foggy finishes. Matt’s hands are still clasped over his face, but he nods, thankful the story’s over. Foggy makes a sympathetic sound and puts an arm over Matt’s shoulder. “Aw, come on, it’s nothing either of us didn’t do when we were in college. I still love you, you brazen hussy.”

“Well, that’s all that matters,” Matt says, hunkering down on Foggy’s shoulder and preparing to stay for a spell. “God, my head hurts.” After a moment, Foggy pushes Matt’s coffee at him and they sit there, rather unsteady in the stomach but contented and most importantly not alone.

After another long moment, Matt feels Foggy’s lips on his forehead and he purses his lips back in Foggy’s vague direction, half rueful smile, half blown kiss. There’s a chuckle, and then Foggy’s kissing him softly. Once. Twice.

“Matt,” he breathes, and then he pulls at Matt so hard the mug tips over. “Shit, the coffee.”

“Ignore it,” Matt orders, then rears back. “Wait. You don’t think I’m a stinky garbage man, do you?” He got shot down like a line of bottles last night, by people who wanted him for now, but not enough to keep him for good. The possibility that Foggy is more of the same makes his queasy stomach rebel.

Foggy takes Matt by both cheeks and smacks his lips against his face. “Oh Matt. My opinion doesn’t figure into it, you are the _stinkiest_ garbage man.” But instead of pushing him away, Foggy just cuddles Matt’s grumpy face to his chest and plays with his hair, and this is what Matt was chasing all last night. Affection. Acceptance. “You’re a disaster,” Foggy says, “But I think I’ll keep you anyway.”


	18. Matt/Foggy/Mike. Comicsverse argument about secret identities

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Incest warnings if you consider Matt/Mike that way.

When Foggy brings it up, Mike throws the black mask back in his face. More specifically, he stretches it between thumb and forefinger of one hand and sling-shots at him with the forefinger of his other hand. It catches on Foggy’s nose before falling to the floor.

“I’m not wearing it.”

Foggy rubs his face. “Mike…”

Matt, sprawled on the other end of the sofa, snorts and, without de-sprawling, reaches for the beer that’s going warm on the coffee table. Mike leans over and moves it further out of his reach.

“Fucker,” Matt mutters, aiming his heel at Mike’s groin as he sits up properly.

“Come on, it’d be a crime to cover up this pretty face,” Mike says, pointing at himself.

Foggy bunches up the fingers of both hands and gestures at Mike like a small furious Italian man. “That is _several thousand percent_ not the point _._ You can’t just fight crime with your face hanging out everywhere, Mike _.”_

Mike shrugs and puts his feet into Matt’s lap, where they rest for about three startled seconds before they get backhanded to the ground. “No one’s going to think I’m Daredevil, when I’m _standing right next to him,_ ” Mike says.

“I’m not worried about Daredevil’s secret identity, you ginger idiot,” Foggy snaps. He starts to tick point off on his fingers. “I’m worried about the fact you have no social security number, no birth certificate, no records of any kind, and—oh yeah—the former _Mayor’s face._ People are going to figure out you aren’t supposed to exist.”

“Matt,” Mike puts on a whiny little brother voice. “Foggy thinks I don’t exist.”

“Stop being mean to the kid, Foggy,” Matt says, barely swallowing his giggles.

“You. Aren’t. Helping.” Mike doesn’t have Matt’s hearing, but he’d bet good money that Foggy’s teeth are grinding.

“Foggy, moon of my sky, my little snickerdoodle,” Mike says, scooping up Matt’s old black mask. “Did you stop to think,” he flicks off his sunglasses and pulls the fabric over his head. He waves his hand in front of his face “that unlike some people, I need eyeholes?”

Foggy’s teeth snap shut. Matt guffaws.

When Mike pulls off the mask and ruffles his flattened hair, he expects Foggy’s face to be pinched and irritated. Instead, he looks…almost scared, even though his pupils are blown out wide and black.

“Fine. Go see Melvin and get him to make you a mask.” He starts gathering up his briefcase and coat.

“Not the boss of me,” Mike sniffs.

“Then you know where the scissors are. Cut some eyeholes. You’re not going out without cover again,” Foggy snaps, slamming the door.

“Love that guy.”

Matt’s head lolls backwards over the arm of the sofa. “Get in line.” His mouth is all red, so Mike bends and kisses his brother, upside down.

“He liked you in my mask,” Matt murmurs when Mike lets him up. “Could smell it.”

“Jealous?”

Matt makes a fist in the back of Mike’s hair and pulls him down again. “Of you? Please,” he scoffs, and bites another kiss on Mike’s mouth.

\---

The next night, they land noiselessly on Foggy’s fire escape, a little after 3 am. He’s inside, typing listlessly at his laptop with only the desk lamp on, an open bottle and a glass on the desk. At the sight of him, Mike reaches down and adjusts himself inside his brother’s pants.

As soon as the sky had started to darken, Matt had folded to his knees in front of Mike and sucked him to a shuddering orgasm, then another, and then stuffed him, boneless and pliant, into the first Daredevil costume—the tight black one.

“Are you sure you want to patrol?” Mike had purred, head hanging over the edge of the bed, watching Matt do up the seventeen zips on the red suit, “I owe you a couple.”

Matt threw a piece of black fabric onto Mike’s stomach. “Get off your ass, you slut. Work first, then play.” Mike spread out the fabric. It was a black mask, like Matt used to wear, but with a panel of special fabric over the eyes. He could see out as if there was nothing there, but his reflection showed solid black over his face. “Melvin says hi.”

“You say slut like you weren’t the one to put the moves on me,” Mike said lightly, as they jumped off the roof.

Foggy doesn’t turn as Matt eases up the window pane, and doesn’t turn as they inch across the floor, and still doesn’t turn as he snatches Mike’s wrist clear out of the air before he can run a finger through Foggy’s hair. “Have a good night, boys?”

“Yet to be seen,” Mike says, besotted.

Foggy swivels his chair and his breath catches as his eyes flick back and forth but he rallies with a bored: “you’re covered. Good.”

“You like it?” Mike draws a hand down the front of the skin-tight gear. Of the Murdock twins, he’s actually the less vain one, but damn him if he didn’t look at his reflection in Matt’s windows for a good long time, marvelling at all the…clinging.

“It’s fine,” Foggy says gruffly. He reaches for the bottle but Mike’s faster, scooping it up and holding it out of reach.

“Liar,” Matt accuses, from where he’s lounging in a convenient shadow. What a drama queen. “I thought we were done lying.”

Foggy scowls. “Fine. Murdocks look good in black. What more do you want from me?”

”You want to touch him,” Matt says. Foggy goes abruptly red, visible even by the single desk lamp. 

Matt grins, because no one blushes that hard without alarm bells going off all through their body. “Tell the truth now,” he murmurs. 

”Why? YOu already know it,” Foggy snaps. 

“Tell Mike.”

Foggy touches Mike’s torso, just above his hipbone. “I want to bite him. Right…here.” Hmm. Ignoring Mike and talking to Matt, but Mike will take it, because the bare pressure of Foggy’s thumb is doing things to him.

Foggy’s thumb circles, and Mike shivers. “You could,” he offers, lifting the hem of his shirt.

“Cute,” Foggy snorts. “Okay, get out, you two. I’m going to sleep now.”

“Don’t I get a kiss goodnight?” Mike knows what his job is here. He’s the little-shit baby brother who always blurts out the things that big brothers are too dutiful and responsible to say.

“No,” Foggy snaps, but his hand is still on Mike’s skin. “Ask someone else.”

It’s the perfect opening. “Matt?” Mike pouts.

“No, not ‘Matt’, he can’t make me do _anything_ —”

Matt rolls his eyes (it reads in his entire body language) and stalks across the room. But instead of reaching for Foggy, he grips Mike by the knot on the back of his head—always so grabby—and kisses him showily, all messy tongue and sharp teeth.

Mike gets that he’ll never know Foggy the way Matt does—both in terms of the length of their friendship and the depth of his brother’s senses and his understanding of Foggy’s body. But Matt will never know this: the way Foggy’s expression goes nakedly— _ravenously—_ aroused.

“You really want us to leave?” Mike pulls Foggy in between himself and his brother and Matt makes a happy sound as he drops his head to kiss Foggy’s neck.

“Oh my god, please don’t leave,” Foggy gasps, and everything goes wet and red and smeared, kisses traded back and forth, around and around, so that Mike loses track of who he’s touching. Who’s touching him.

By sunrise, they’re tangled in the bed, Matt driving into Foggy from behind and Mike grinding into him from the front, swallowing his moans. 

Foggy comes nearly crying, one hand on each of their faces: fingers clawing at the masks he doesn’t let them remove, fingers sweeping gentle and oh-so-sweetly over their skin.


	19. Matt/Foggy. Bon Appetit YouTube Channel AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also includes Jessica/Luke/Trish

“Hey everyone, you’re in the Bon Appetit test kitchen with me, Foggy Nelson, and today we’re going to make a gluten-free chocolate chestnut cake. It’s gonna be super dark and crazy delicious and just the teensiest bit sinful. You know, a little bit like our features editor—”

Behind the camera, Jessica Jones fumbled her clipboard. “Jesus Christ, _cut_!”

Foggy wiped his palms on his apron. “What?”

Oh god, the twitch in her eye was back. Take a break from TV directing, Trish had said, come work for a YouTube cooking channel. It’ll be easy, she said. There’ll be cookies every day, she said. “What do you mean, _‘what_?’”

“I got through the intro okay, didn’t I?”

“Just let him do his thing, I can edit it out,” Danny sighed, shifting the camera rig on his shoulder. 

“We’re here for you and for cake, okay Foggy? Not for any other reason or any other magazine employee.”

Foggy hooted. “You want to eat cake, don’t lie—” Jessica cut him off with an enraged gesture at Danny’s camera lens, and its operator cut her a sideways glance and said, giggling just a little bit, “still rolling.”

Foggy grinned harder, and he was more radiant than the sunshine streaming in the windows and fucking up Jess’ lighting setup. Don’t tell anyone, but that was why Jessica loved him. He took all her misanthropy and just rolled with it. And when he was done rolling, he gave her food.

“Hi everyone, this is Foggy in the BA test kitchen, and today we’re making…”

\---

The next week, they filmed a Korean pork-shoulder recipe that wafted the smell of roasted chilis and sizzling fat into every corner of the office, and as the recipe neared completion, the background of all of Danny’s shots became packed with staffers who suddenly all had “errands” and “meetings” in the test kitchen. 

“Alright, so now we’ve got all our solo superheroes: Pork shoulder!” Foggy displayed a rack of grilled steaks to the camera. “Dressing!” He held up a bowl of vivid red sauce. “Greens!” he scooped up some shredded scallion and perilla and let it rain back into the bowl. “You know what time it is, don’t you? It’s time! To! Assemble!”

“Foggy!”

“Hey, it’s Matt! Just in time! We’re filming, by the way. Everyone say hi to Matt.”

Murdock had the grace to look a little bit ashamed. “Oh, I’ll come back later.”

“No, stay! Hang out, the internet loves you.” The internet did love him. Matt Murdock had an almost superhuman sense of taste and a tongue that was sharp as a santoku knife. So even though he spent most of his workday spooling magazine copy through his text reader and ripping it to shreds with edits, he often dropped in on the test kitchen to lick spoons and unleash his trademark savagery. Whenever he did that on camera, the comments went bananas.

Well, Jessica wished it was bananas. The emojis most often used were the fire and the eggplant.

Foggy was gazing at Matt like he was a free crate of black truffles. “What did you need?”

“Oh, uh, okay. I just got your exotic pickle recipes—”

“Uh huh, taste this,” Foggy said, holding out a sliver of dressed pork shoulder on a spoon.

Matt, who talked a big game about being a hard-ass editor, opened his mouth like a baby bird and let Foggy feed him. “Mmmmmmm. Chili oil? No, wait.” Matt smacked his lips. “Gochujang. God, it’s like a fire-cracker. Mmmm, Foggy, wow.”

Jessica dug the corner of her clipboard into the soft part of her temple. If Foggy melted any further she was going to have to scrape him up into a bucket.

“Anyway, I thought we agreed, no garlic scapes…”

As Matt railed, Foggy ducked his head and muttered, “just date me, you gorgeous bastard.”

Jessica waved at Foggy and stabbed a finger at her own sternum. He looked down—right at his mic, which was a device that was good at amplifying quiet speech and was connected to another device called a computer whose sole purpose was to record things for all eternity—and raised horrified eyes. 

Danny sighed—nearly silently, he was a professional—and made a snipping motion with two fingers, which was the international camera operator sign-language for “don’t worry, we can fix it in post.”

“…Sound good?” Matt wrapped up.

“Anything you want, Matt,” Foggy breathed.

Jess smashed her entire face into her clipboard.

\---

There was no reason why the internet loved Bon Appetit’s resident pain in the ass. He wasn’t a recipe developer and he wasn’t a channel personality. If you asked Jessica, all Matt Murdock was good for was throwing her production schedule into a vitamix and hitting liquify, through his endless reorganization of what recipes were good enough to be published in what month.

Even though Jessica was from a shittier part of Hell’s Kitchen—a real estate agent would have said “an authentic neighbourhood”— she comported herself in a manner befitting 1 World Trade Centre and refrained from putting her foot through a glass door as she marched into Matt’s office.

"Murdock!” she barked through gritted teeth. It was politer than shouting. “What the fuck did you do to my—”

It was only 10 in the morning, but Foggy was perched on Matt’s desk, a bowl of pasta on his knee and a fork in his hand. The tines of that fork, in that exact moment, were slipping through Matt’s lips, coming away clean and shiny as Matt chewed, swallowed, smiled.

"—filming schedule,” Jessica trailed off.

Matt leaned forward in his chair, his elbows practically in Foggy’s lap. “Foggy, that’s delicious,” he murmured. “

“Hi Jess!” Foggy waved at her with the fork. “You want some tagliatelle? It’s got black garlic in it.” Wordlessly, Jessica turned around and nearly walked into a closed door.

\---

“Hey baby,” Trish craned her body over Jessica’s laptop and kissed her forehead. Trish was Bon Appetit’s digital editor and ran the magazine’s website and YouTube channel.

Jessica narrowed her eyes. “What do you want?”

Big innocent blue eyes glistened back at her. “Can’t I kiss my girlfriend hello?”

“You’re using your ‘I need something’ voice. What’s going on?”

Trish huffed, but then she was all business, which—don’t tell her—was so much hotter than Trish the flirt. “Your boyfriend and I were talking about channel traffic—”

“Why were you talking to Luke about analytics? He’s a pastry chef.”

“—and I’m pitching something upstairs for a new series.”

“Okay?”

“You’re the one who’ll have to direct it.”

“I direct everything here. You’re giving me a heads up because it’s gonna piss me off. What is it?”

Trish bit her lip excitedly. “ _Recipe Rx with Matt Murdock_. Recipe troubleshooting and unrestrained bitchery. We’ll trend so hard.”

Jessica’s shoulders slumped. “Thanks, I hate it.”

\---

After that, every Friday Jessica stood between Danny the camera operator and Malcolm the associate producer, and she watched Matt perch on one of the test kitchen’s high stools as a parade of food editors fawned over his silver palate.

Luke fed Matt croissants and danishes, jachnun and rotis, and they geeked out about laminated dough techniques until the night janitors started shooting them looks to clear out so that they could work.

Karen, mid-pizza development, racked up a line of bowls and handed Matt a bouquet of spoons as they whittled down the tributes in the tomato sauce Hunger Games.

Marci, who matched Matt in the epicness of her zingers, propped him up next to the stove as she worked and fed him endless sips of custard that would be the backbone of a chai brioche bread pudding, the two of them adjusting the spice mixture by milligrams and reading the entire kitchen into the ground.

Claire and Colleen, the test kitchen managers, took Matt (and by extension, the film crew) on a tour of the walk-in refrigerators and pantries. Matt then spent fifteen minutes sniffing tomatoes, insulted everything about them, and by the time he’d finished, Colleen was on the phone with one supplier, dumping them in no uncertain terms while Claire was on the phone with another, asking if they wanted to supply one of the best food magazines in America 

\---

“Hey Jess, we got a problem.” Malcolm knocked on Jessica’s office door on the last Friday. She lifted a headphone off her ear just enough to hear him.

“Foggy doesn’t want to film the _Recipe Rx_ spot.”

“ _What?!_ ”

“Yeah, he’s down in one of the walk-ins hyperventilating.”

“What for?”

“I dunno, maybe because of his massive crush on Murdock?”

Jessica pushed her chair into the back wall with a bang. “They’ve filmed together dozens of times. Why’s he being a piss-baby _now_?”

When they got down to the test kitchen, Malcolm pointed out which of the walk-ins Foggy had selected to melt down in, and Jessica grabbed the handle, ready to jerk it open and tongue-lash whatever she found inside. She’d directed prestige TV, and if the divas on those shows filmed whatever she said they were filming, whenever she said they were filming it, Foggy Nelson was going to come out of his hidey-hole and smile for the camera if she had to drag him out by his nipple-ring.

Malcolm’s hand shot out, right next to her head, and kept the door from opening. “Malcolm, what the _fuck_!”

Malcolm raised his chin at the window in the walk-in door. “Look.”

Inside, Matt had pushed Foggy up against a stack of vegetable crates, and either they were trying to tear each other’s throats out, or they were kissing. As Jessica felt her eyes nearly pop out of her head, everything suddenly went very tender and very very _real_. Matt’s arms went around Foggy’s shoulders and cradled him, chafing his bare arms in the cold.

Jessica could see Foggy’s mouth curl up in a smile, even as Matt was still attached to it. “That’s not food-safe,” she groaned. She raked her hands through her hair, squeezing her brain for a few anxious heartbeats, and then stalked away with Malcolm on her heels.

”What’re we gonna do, boss? We need to film something,” Malcolm said.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” she slapped her clipboard into Malcolm’s stomach. “You’re the director now. Karen, I’m borrowing an apron! New girl!” In the corner, a head full of fuzzy red hair lifted at Jessica’s yell. “New girl, you wanna be famous? You’ve got five minutes to prep, and then you’re going to walk me through that recipe while Danny points a camera at you.”

Danny looked between Jessica and Robyn, bewildered. “Wait, what’s going on? Where are Matt and Foggy?” As if summoned by the chaos and the yelling, all the other food editors stood around behind Danny, glancing confusedly at Jess and her flowery apron, standing on the wrong side of the camera for the first time.

“Danny, just roll!” Jessica snapped, not meeting any of their eyes.

“Yeah, okay, on it, boss!”

Malcolm clapped the board and cued Jessica.

Jessica stared down the big eye of the camera lens and tried to smile. “Hi everyone, welcome to the BA test kitchen. I’m Jessica Jones and this is _Recipe Rx_. We’ve uh, had a bit of a scheduling snafu, so Matt Murdock’s not available. And um. neither is Foggy Nelson. But hey, you’ve got me.”

She spread her arms and tried to look charming and telegenic despite being more uncomfortable than she thought humanly possible. Malcolm was grinning, his arms clutching the clipboard to his chest like he was holding his heart. He whispered something to Luke, who then smiled warmly at her, mouthing “I love you.”

“Um, right. Okay. Today, I’m going to be interviewing one of our culinary interns, someone who doesn’t get a lot of attention but does a lot of good work here. I think she does, anyway. And I’m going to try my damnedest to say nice things about whatever she’s working on…” she took in the tray of ingredients that Robyn had hastily assembled. Some of it was red and wiggly. “…which looks like chicken livers.” Jessica swallowed down a gag.

Robyn shot the camera a wary look and handed Jessica a mortar and pestle. “First step,” she said, “we pulverize.”


	20. Matt/Foggy. Double Proposal

Foggy opened his underwear drawer and stifled a scream. Life as a vigilante’s boyfriend had its share of challenges, ranging from worried nights alone to the bi-annual kidnapping attempt, but underwear theft was not supposed to be one of them. 

Across the apartment, said vigilante was whistling, and Foggy poked his finger into the gap in the tidily-folded underwear, as if he could bring the lost item back with wishing. He could only fit three of his fingers in there; it wasn’t a very big thing. Just a velvet box, big enough for a ring, one made of titanium, virtually indestructible and perfectly smooth but for his and Matt’s initials in Braille.

Another man, one who wasn’t in a long-term relationship with Matt Murdock, would probably have panicked, or been gripped by a plan-altering insecurity. But Foggy, who had been alive for thirty-six years, and had known Matt for eighteen of them, knew an opening salvo when he saw the hole where it used to be.

\---

After Matt swung out of the window to go on patrol, Foggy marched to Matt’s side of the bedroom to jerk open his underwear drawer.

At the last second, he stopped. That would be the first place Matt would expect Foggy to look for it. He’d probably pull back his hand caught in a mouse trap. Narrow-eyed, Foggy let go of the drawer pulls and walked around the apartment, getting into Matt’s peculiar way of thinking.

He hauled out Matt’s Daredevil trunk and grimaced at the old-sports-gear smell that wafted up from it. He found nothing, and he even palpated--respectfully--the rolled up fabric of Jack Murdock’s boxing robe.

He dug into the back of the pantry and under the bathroom sink where they kept Matt’s bandages. He checked the pockets of all of Matt’s suit jackets. He even looked in the stupid cupboard over the fridge, a cupboard no human ever used, even humans as short on space as New Yorkers.

After two hours, Foggy found himself turning frustrated circles in the middle of the apartment. He’d looked every place that Matt considered no-Foggy zones and No. Ring.

He rubbed his eyes. Eighteen years he’d known this man, had lived with him for four years as best friends and later another five as lovers. He should know where his boyfriend would hide something. No one knew Matt better than Foggy did, and there was nothing that Foggy knew better than Matt.

Foggy raised his head from his palms. “And he knows that,” he said out loud.

He stalked to his side of the bedroom and glared at his chest of drawers. His own. The one he fished in every day. “You wouldn’t,” he muttered.

This was Matt he was talking about. Of course he would.

Foggy opened the drawer and scooped out the contents. Nothing. He emptied the other two drawers. Nothing. Dammit. He started to pile the underwear and t-shirts back in when he noticed the height of the space between the drawer and the top of the chest. He put his hand in, turned it so that it was palm up, and slapped it against the inside of the top.

Bingo.

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you, Matt?” Foggy said, ripping the tape that held the box. He snapped it open and stared. 

“Huh,” he said.

There was a ring inside, but it wasn’t the ring he’d agonized over in texts to Karen and Luke and his dad. A diamond twinkled at him, the internal fire flashing with his rapidly-accelerating breathing, and when he lifted it out from the little foam cushion, he saw the inside had engraving.

_Love, Matt_

Foggy clapped a hand over his mouth.

\---

Usually, Foggy was in bed before Matt finished his nightly patrol, but tonight, instead of slipping into Foggy’s sleepy embrace, Matt found himself being body-checked into the wall and having the breath kissed out of him.

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” Foggy bit the words along Matt’s jaw and grabbed his crotch without preamble. “How was patrol?”

Matt’s head lolled forward onto Foggy’s shoulder. “Good,” he laughed breathlessly. “Does this mean you’re not mad at me anymore?”

“Why would I be mad?” Foggy jerked at the zips. Endless, endless zips. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” Matt moaned. Foggy had gotten the pants open. “You were being weird at dinner. But let me make it up to you anyway.”

“Such a good boyfriend,” Foggy said, pulling Matt towards the bedroom by the dick.

\---

The next morning, a Saturday, Foggy was puttering around in the kitchen, wondering if the future should involve a Spanish omelette, when Matt came up behind him and sank his teeth into his neck.

“Payback for last night,” he said.

“I’m frying onions! Go put on some underwear at least,” Foggy ordered, but he ruined his sternness by leaning into Matt’s bite and shivering.

Matt’s expression shifted like he had just remembered something, and he sauntered faux-casually to the bedroom.

A minute later, he stalked back out, fully dressed and glowering. Foggy bit his entire lip to keep from laughing. Now, it was entirely within Matt’s ability to say, “Foggy, where’s the ring that I’m desperate to propose to you with, so desperate that I _stole_ the ring with which you’re planning on proposing to me.”

He could say that. He wasn’t going to. Foggy watched Matt’s mouth twist in frustration and felt like dancing.

“Coffee?” Matt finally snapped.

“Please,” Foggy chirped.

\---

It became the world’s most perverse game of capture the flag. Foggy would probably have felt bad he was hiding a small, nondescript item from someone who could only sense rough the outlines of things, but dammit, Foggy was fully sighted and _he couldn’t find his fucking ring either._

\---

Matt came home to find Foggy with his closet exploded all over the bed.

“Looking for something?” Matt asked lightly.

Foggy glared. “Spring cleaning.”

Matt’s grin could have lit Times Square. “It’s October.”

\---

It was ass-o'clock, and Foggy sat up in bed. Either a rat of unusual size was loose in the kitchen or one normal-sized boyfriend was in there losing his marbles.

“Morning, babe,” he croaked, and Matt froze. He was on his knees, shaking all the food canisters in the cupboard. He was still in the Daredevil suit. “What’re you doing?”

“Making…pancakes?”

\---

This is the closest they ever got to talking about it:

“Tell me where it is,” Foggy growled, holding Matt’s hips so hard he was leaving marks.

Matt arched his back. “Make me.”

Foggy snapped his hips and they both nearly came on the spot. "Fuck, what were we talking about?“

Matt grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him down for a kiss. "Dunno. Don’t care.”

\---

A week later, Matt threw a book into Foggy’s lap while he was in the middle of writing a motion. “Hey, watch it, I’m working!” The book split open in Foggy hand, and wedged into the spine was a ring. “Are you proposing to me with my own ring?” Foggy said, throat tight.

Matt was standing over him with his hands on his hips. “No,” he said. “I want you to put it on me.”

“Wait.” Foggy dropped the book. “Does this mean I won?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t care, I don’t want to be the winner. I want to be your husband. _Ask me_.”

Well, okay then.

“Matt,” Foggy said, kissing the back of Matt’s outstretched hand and slipping the ring on his finger. “I love you,” he was starting to tear up. “Never leave me. Never stop fighting with me. Never stop loving me. Marry me, Matt. Please.”

“Yes, I’ll marry you.” He threw his arms around Foggy’s neck and they kissed for a long time. “Foggy,” he breathed, when the kiss broke. “Where’s my ring? The one I got for you?”

Foggy stroked back Matt’s hair and wiped away his tears. “You sure you want to know?”

Matt rested his forehead on Foggy’s, beaming soggily. “Yes, sweetheart.”

Foggy smiled. His boyf—his _fiancé_ — was so soft. But when Foggy was standing on the bathroom counter with a screwdriver in his teeth and his hand wrist deep in a light fixture, soft Matt was suddenly gone and asshole Matt was back in the house.

“I’ve changed my mind. I want a divorce.”

Foggy laughed around the screwdriver. “I can just leave the ring up here, you know.”

“No, give it!” Matt gestured impatiently.

Foggy dropped the box and Matt caught it, grumbling as he shook the dust off. “Thanks.” He pocketed it and walked out of the bathroom.

“Wait, that’s it?” Foggy yelled, clambering down.

Matt gave him a confused look. “What’s it?”

“Weren’t we in the middle of something?” Foggy spread his hands disbelievingly.

Matt propped his chin on his hand. His left hand. Titanium flashed at Foggy mockingly. “Were we?”

Foggy wagged a finger in Matt’s face. “You’re going to get that divorce sooner than you expect, I swear to god.”

Matt’s face was smug smug smug. “Can’t divorce me until we get married. We can’t get married until I propose—”

“That’s technically _not_ true, most couples, ones where one of them isn’t a total _jerk_ just propose the once—”

“—and I don’t feel like proposing today—”

“—then they get married—”

“—so you’ll just have to wait—”

“—which is a plan I’m _really_ re-considering, believe you me. Wait until _when?”_

“Oh, whenever. In the middle of the night. When you’re in the shower. During a client meeting. Maybe I’ll just text you.”

Foggy pulled at his hair. “Matt!”

Matt leaned up and kissed him through a shit-eating grin. “Don’t start something you can’t finish, dear husband.”


	21. Matt/Elektra. Mr. and Mrs. Smith AU

Matt asks her when they’re huddled in the back of a greyhound bus speeding through the night, the verbal and physical blows that Stick flung at them still ringing in both their ears. 

(“We‘re not your soldiers!” she screamed. “We just want a normal life!”

“You aren’t normal and you never will be. You’re meant for the mission,” her father growls. “You think you’ll be satisfied? You were born for the fight.”

“We don’t need it,” Matt said, taking her hand. “We don’t need you.”

Matt threw his staves at Stick’s feet. Elektra’s sai landed on top of it.)

He comforts himself with her hair, rubbing the strands with shaking fingers. They’ve deserted her father’s army for each other, but they’re not so ignorant that they think he’ll let them just leave him, leave his mission, to live peacefully in the outside world. Elektra thinks Matt’s hometown is the first place Stick will search, but he swears that there is no city better for disappearing into than New York. She has to trust him. She does trust him.

“Elektra,” Matt says suddenly. The streetlamps that line the highway make light strobe over his face. “Let’s get married.”

Elektra looks at his face. He’s strong and scared and his grip on her hand feels unbreakable. She feels the world open up for the first time, because they’re free, and they’re together, and they’re invincible. 

She squeezes back. “Okay.”

They’re seventeen. 

\---

_Twenty years later_

The kitchen in their apartment is mostly for show; neither of them like to cook, and they’ve gotten to a point where they don’t have to.

When Matt comes home with his coat over his briefcase, Elektra’s in her study with a glass of wine, looking over some contracts. 

“Where would you like to eat tonight?” she asks as he passes her door on the way to the bedroom. 

“Wherever you want,” he says, and steps over the sling-backs she’s abandoned in the hallway. She can hear him sigh as he pulls open his tie and unbuttons his shirt—he always did hate the feeling of something tight around his neck. “It’s your choice, honey,” Matt says. 

She and Matt ride quietly to the restaurant, letting the cabbie’s music hang in the air between them. 

It was hard, after they married. At first, they lived like runaways, certain that Stick could trace them if they spent money. They went to a community college using fake names, living in a building one step up from condemned, rent in cash. 

After a few years, the constant fear of discovery lessened and Elektra made contact with the banks where her family money was held. They went to university. Michael Moran took a law degree while Elise Tranh took an MBA at NYU. Elise started a consultancy business. Michael went into practice with a friend he met at Columbia. 

By the time they were thirty, Elise and Michael could afford an apartment with a Central Park view. They have a joint membership to an expensive martial arts club uptown, but they never spar—not with other people and never, never with each other. 

The cab pulls over in front of the restaurant, and when Elektra tips generously, the cabbie wishes them a pleasant evening. They get seated right away in a quiet, romantic corner. They’re better dressed than everyone around them. 

They don’t really talk. 

\---

“Darling, I have to run out,” Elektra says, sitting on the edge of Matt’s side of the bed. He’s propped up against the headboard, a book open over his knees. “A client in Hong Kong’s had an emergency.” 

Matt’s smile is sweet and slight as he leans over his book to kiss her cheek. “I won’t wait up.”

“Good,” she says, kissing him back. 

\---

Two figures crouch like gargoyles against the New York night, peering down into an otherwise unremarkable shipping yard. Cigarette smoke rises from one of them in a stream. 

“Don’t care if it’s the transport company or the shell company that owns it. Someone in that mess is trafficking humans. Makes ‘em all guilty to my eyes,” Frank says next to her. She doesn’t have Matt’s hearing but she can hear the bullet he’s turning over and over in his fingers. 

“We still have time to find out,” Elektra says. Her mask muffles her words. “When we run out of time, well…” An unremarkable man with a comb-over bustles out of one of the yard offices and starts haranguing a guard who has easily two feet on him, gesturing angrily at a clipboard. “Hey Frank, doesn’t he look like a helpful man?”

Frank takes a long, insolent drag and flicks the stub, still cherry, over the edge. “Red, I like the way you think.”

\---

New York sprouts masked vigilantes like hipster coffee shops—Elektra is aware of the hypocrisy of her saying that, as she pushes open the manager’s office window with red silk covering her from the bridge of her nose to her throat—but she isn’t expecting an armoured figure to detach from a shadow and bring a club down on her forearm when her hand is inches from the manager’s shirt collar. 

Stupid. She’s out of practice. She should have noticed how the manager, sitting at his desk facing away from the window, had sweat a dark streak down his back and was practically holding onto the arms of his chair like it would fly out from under him. Bait in a trap, and she fell for it. 

The manager dives under his desk as the armoured man fights both Frank and her to a standstill. He’s hard to keep in view—seemingly made of shadows and moving like a swirl of smoke. The lower half of his face is the only skin visible, and it’s a pale smudge in the dark. 

“You don’t want to do this,” the kevlar tank says in a voice that sounded like gravel scraped over concrete. “Turn back. Now.”

Frank meets her glance with a confused look. The armour is perfectly understandable. The double-D insignia and the horns? Really? 

Elektra cracks her neck and lifts her fists. “No.”

\---

“You smell like the sports club,” Matt murmurs the next morning, nose pressed to the back of Elektra’s neck. 

She’s not even fully awake, but she has a lie ready. “I needed to work out some frustrations after I finished work. Hong Kong was a circus.”

In reality, after she and Frank ran off the clown with the horns, she cleaned up at her fancy club, the bandages and antiseptics spread out on the exotic-wood bench in the pristine white locker room.

“Mike!” Someone calls from the front room. “Come on you guys, it’s almost noon and I have bagels.”

Elektra levers herself up, a line of pain popping all down her side like firecrackers. It makes her feel good in a way she hasn’t felt in months. “Coming, Foggy.”

When they come out of their bedroom, Matt’s law partner has the Times spread out on their kitchen island. 

“I don’t remember giving you a key,” Matt says. 

Foggy turns a page. “I can pick locks,” he sniffs. 

“Uh huh,” Matt says, reaching over Foggy’s shoulder to steal the bagel from his plate. 

“I bought you a dozen, you freeloader,” Foggy says, mollified only when Elektra puts a cup of coffee in front of him. “Thanks Ellie. You hear there was a kidnapping attempt at Sanditon Shipping? Wasn’t that the company you were asking about last month?”

Elektra almost chokes. “Was it?”

\---

“What are we doing back here, Red?” Frank growls. They’re overlooking the shipping yard again. “I see you got some new toys.”

Elektra spins her sai like a gunslinger showing off a six shooter. They feel good, like she’s been missing part of her arm for twenty years. “It’s the shell company; I think the subsidiary’s just muscle.”

“You muscle for a boat load of scared kidnapped women, you don’t get a pass from me.”

“I’m not disagreeing. I just want to be sure.”

They meet the clown with the horns again. Elektra’s not sure if he’s protecting the traffickers or what his deal is—neither she nor Frank are chatty in a fight, and Double D certainly isn’t volunteering his side of the story—but when she sends her sai airborne, clocks him twice with her fists and once with her forehead before catching them like a rhythm gymnast, his smug face goes slack.

“What?” is all he gets out before she gets a knee around his the back of his neck and he goes down like a baby at naptime. 

She spent nine months perfecting that move under Stick’s cold glare when she was thirteen. Doing it again feels like coming home. 

\---

When Elektra gets home the next day, Matt’s waiting by their dining table, tablecloth-covered, sliverware-dressed. He’s holding a bottle of wine. 

“What’s this?” Matt hasn’t made a romantic gesture in years. 

“I thought we’d try something different.” The wine bottle goes into an ice bucket and he’s reaching for her, taking her coat and giving her his arm to steady herself as she kicks off her shoes. He leads her to her chair, and pulls it out like a waiter. “How was your day?”

“It was great, actually,” Elektra says. After her and hornhead’s encounter at the shipping yard, her blood was singing. She didn’t sleep. She got into three other fights and then went right to the office, and every single one of her conference calls remarked on the happiness in her voice.

Matt smiles and pours her a glass of wine. “I’m glad to hear that.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her husband’s fingers slip off the neck of the bottle and in the same heartbeat her fingers close on cold green glass, inches from the floor. Confused, she puts the wine on the table. 

“Oops,” Matt says. 

He serves her slices of chateaubriand with artichokes, his crisp sleeves rolled up over his forearms and his hair tumbling over his forehead. He flips the carving knife, smirking wickedly. 

“That was delicious, darling, thank you,” she says when they’re done, kissing Matt on the top of his head. “I’ll clean up.” 

“Are you sure?” Matt asks, smirk still in place. He touches her neck, drawing a line down her jugular. 

Elektra has to clear her throat, suddenly warm. “I’m sure.”

As she scrubs the pan in the sink, in the window’s reflection, she sees a glint of light that’s not from the city, and without thought, her fingers close on two kitchen knives, crossing the blades behind her head and catching the carving knife that Matt’s just spun towards her neck. 

“Matt! That was a gift!” she yells, spinning. Immediately she’s fending off the carving knife again. Matt slices so close to her face she can smell artichokes, and paring knives certainly aren’t her normal choice of weapon, but she’s holding her own. 

When she knocks Matt’s knife away—he’s still smirking, the murderous bastard—he comes at her, bare-knuckled. 

She stabs both knives into their reclaimed-wood counter and cold-cocks her husband with her fist. 

He staggers back, blinking. Blood dribbles down his chin, and he licks it, the curve of his mouth going sharp and hungry. “Come on, sweetheart, or have you lost your touch?”

His voice is a growl of gravel over concrete, a moon-lit grin she remembers alongside the smell of the east river and diesel shipping fuel. “It was you!” she shouts, heedless of their neighbours. “You bastard!”

“That’s rich coming from you. sweetheart!” he shouts back, swinging at her, and dammit, how could Elektra have missed it before? Matt’s form is singular—coiled rage and hair-trigger control, grace and abandon in equal measure. He’s in better shape than she is, she realizes. He left their promise behind a long time ago, and that makes her furious. 

Her fists rain down on him, but he parries them like they’ve been sparring their entire lives. “You said we’d give it up! You wanted to be normal!”

“I’m not normal! I never was!” His elbow brackets Elektra’s windpipe painfully, but she runs up the wall, cracking their expensive framed prints, and flips over his head. Now her arm is a vise around his throat, and she puts all her weight into the hold. “You didn’t need it like I did,” he’s struggling to speak. 

Outrage makes her arm loosen, and Matt pulls away. Rage makes her kick him in the center of his back, and he leaves a dent in the wall with his body. 

“I didn’t need it?” her voice is low and quiet, like the rumbling before an earthquake. Matt’s face goes wary—it’s an expression she’s never seen before. “ _I didn’t need it_? What do you know about what I _needed_? To feel, to live. Damn you to hell, Matt, I’ve been dead for years!” she screams. 

His face goes slack then, shocked, and he reaches for her, kissing her like he could suck the pain out. 

“Elektra, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, breathing hard, kissing her face all over. Elektra gets her hands around his throat and squeezes, tastes the sound he makes when he chokes. 

Just before it goes on too long, he breaks her hold, gasping. 

“Come on then, if you need it so much,” she taunts. He’s still leaning with his hands on his knees, panting. She sees a glimpse of a white-toothed grin, and it’s her only warning before his shoulder is in her stomach, and she’s arcing backwards over their designer sofa. 

She lands under him, without any room to strike at his center mass with her limbs, so she headbutts him. 

He pulls back, yowling, and grips her hair to keep her still. 

A gasp. Widened eyes. 

Loud breathing in a sudden silence. 

Matt leans down to kiss her, slow as a fairy tale prince waking a princess. His lips brush hers, soft and sweet. 

She bites him bloody. 

It’s been twenty years, but her husband still looks good with red in his wicked grin. 

\---

“Hey guys?” There’s a feeble knock at the door. “Mike? Elise? It’s Foggy. You know there’s no one who loves boundaries more than me but…are you okay?” 

Elektra knows what they look like when she opens the door. They’re half-naked. The apartment is a ruin. Her hair is a mess, and there’s lipstick is all over Matt’s neck, and—dear god—there’s a swipe of it disappearing into his trousers. 

“Yeah, fine, why?” Matt says, scratching his head. A ring of bruises is already blooming around his wrist.

“Oh. Kay…” Foggy says, eyes wide. “Well, if you’re sure.”

Matt’s lips touch Elektra’s temple, and he’s started to fiddle with the hem of her slip, lifting it higher inch by inch. “We’re sure,” he murmurs into her hair. 

“I’m just gonna go to Walgreens and buy earplugs for the whole floor then,” Foggy mutters, backing out. 

“Bye,” Elektra says, turning in Matt’s arms and scratching lines up the backs of his thighs through the fabric of his trousers. 

“Yeah, see you, Foggy,” he says, kicking the door shut and picking her up bridal style. 

Elektra swings around his shoulders and drives him into the ground with a bang, one knee hard in the small of his back. 

“Oh sweetheart, you do love me,” Matt moans into the floorboards, and they’re off again. 

\---*

“What did you want with Sanditon Shipping?” he asks later, when they’re too tired to go again. They’re too tired even to make it to the bedroom; they’re on the living room floor, pillowed on a pile of their shredded clothes. 

“Humans are moving through there. We think drug mules, but it could be anything.”

“It’s not Sanditon. It’s the subsidiary, St. Augustine Transport.”

Elektra lifts her head to look at him. “You’re sure?”

“The manager you tried to snatch? The one I was protecting? Gratefulness made him forthcoming.”

“Really?” Elektra kisses his jaw. “We should go visit him.”

They shower together, and as much as Matt talks a pretty game about doing it again against the shower wall, he’s not seventeen anymore. He hooks her leg over his shoulder and lets her ride his face till the hot water runs out. 

“Can you keep your hands off long enough for me to put my damned dress on?” she giggles. 

“I doubt it,” Matt nibbles into her neck. 

It takes them hours to get dressed, and just as Elektra meets Matt in their front hall, shrugging into a coat, a vase on the table explodes. 

Elektra blinks, and then next to her, a mirror shatters, raining glass. 

Matt throws her to the floor as all around them, the walls sprout bullet holes with a puff of plaster dust and the curtains dance and disintegrate. 

“Who the fuck is shooting at us?” Elektra yells, crawling behind the sofa. 

“You were looking at Sanditon, I was looking at St. Augustine. I wonder which one didn’t want us to pool our information?” Matt yells back. 

“They’re in it together!” Elektra punches the floor. 

Just as the hail of bullets seems to build to a crescendo, something resembling a cannon blast, coming from within the apartment, makes everything quiet. 

“Matt!” Someone calls from the corridor. “Elektra! Are you alive?”

Elektra pokes her head up. 

The first thing she sees is the barrel of a rifle, almost as long as her arm. The second thing she sees is a hank of blond hair slashing down across a forehead, and then Foggy Nelson’s narrow eyes. 

“What the fuck!” Matt, standing too now, gestures at the rifle, but Foggy puts his back against the wall next to the blasted out windows and peers out.

“Not bad,” he says. “Still got it.”

“Foggy,” Matt says, sounding more overwhelmed now than when the bullets were flying. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Remember that internship I took in DC? After Columbia?”

It had been hard on them, the separation, Foggy’d been gone for four years, and in that time, sent almost no word to Matt. He returned looking—a little haunted. “Yeah?”

Foggy reaches under his coat and brings out a black oblong—a clip. He spins it expertly and slams it into the rifle. “S.H.I.E.L.D Academy.” 

“ _What?_ ” she and Matt bleat in unison. 

“Foggy Nelson, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D, at your service.”

“Were you—assigned to watch us?” Matt chokes. 

“I was,” Foggy says, solidly and without shame. “You can be mad about that later. I think we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

Elektra hears the steady, silent footsteps of armed men penetrating into their apartment. Matt’s jaw jumps and he pulls out his staff from the back of his belt, twirling it in anticipation. When she scoffs, he shrugs ruefully. 

“We were never normal, sweetheart,” he says. 

Elektra reaches up under her coat and pulls out the sai. With the tips, she slices her dress down the side seams, hip to hem. 

“No, we weren’t,” she agrees. 

“You won’t get any disagreement from me, you pair of loons,” Foggy says, dropping the long-range rifle and going for a handgun in a shoulder holster. “You good?”

Elektra feels Matt at her back on one side and Foggy at the other. She’s wreathed in smoke and surrounded by a ring of armed operatives who want her dead. Her blood is singing. 

She bares her teeth at them. “Now I am.”


	22. Matt/Foggy. Matt gets Truth Serumed

The scariest thing was how not at all scary it all was.

“When I was 16 I had a crush on Father Olivier. He was from Quebec,” Matt sighed, his chin lolling on his fist, elbow splayed wide on Foggy’s kitchen island. “I’d have dreams about him and go to his office first thing in the morning hoping he could smell that my underwear was still sticky…”

“Oh my actual God, I think _I’m_ the one who needs a priest,” Foggy muttered, and stuck his finger in his ear. “Please do something,” he begged into the phone. “I can’t just let him go flapping his yap like this. Not just because when he gets over this he’s going to die of embarrassment, but he’s gonna get himself stone cold killed when he tells someone exactly what he thinks of them. No, I’m not overreacting! Matt, say something to Jessica,” Foggy ordered, holding out the phone. 

“I always want to play with your hair,” Matt called. “Also I wouldn’t say no to a threesome with you and Luke.”

Jessica made a horrified noise over the line. “Believe me now?” Foggy demanded. 

Matt smiled and kicked his feet. Why was he ever afraid of telling the truth? It wasn’t scary at all. 

\---

“Here,” Foggy slammed another bottle of water on the counter next to Matt’s elbow. “Hydrate. Maybe it’ll flush the truth serum out of you.”

“Love you,” Matt said and picked up the bottle with both hands, drinking deep. “But I’m not sure how that’s how it works.”

\---

Halfway through their dinner, Foggy’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it. “It’s Misty. She’s done her Control thing and lined up some folks to patrol tonight.”

“That’s nice of her,” Matt said. “Tell them all thanks.”

Foggy paused. “I really thought you’d fight me more on this. You’re okay to stay in?”

Matt shrugged. “You’re here and I love you?”

“I love you too, dumbass,” Foggy said, and flicked a noodle at him. 

\---

“I miss Elektra,” Matt said, pulling the screen-reader earbud out of his ear and flinging it down. Foggy’s hands spasmed on his keyboard. 

“What…does this have to do with Ms. Rabinowitz’s adoption?” he said carefully. 

“Nothing,” Matt sighed, rubbing his face. “I just think about her all the time.”

“Do you want to see her?” Foggy said stiffly. “I could try and get word to her. If you wanted.” Foggy sounded like he’d rather chew through his own leg than do what he offered. But he really did mean it—he’d find her if Matt wanted him to. Matt could smell it. 

He put his hand over Foggy’s. “I love you so much.”

“I take it that’s a no,” Foggy said gruffly, turning back to his laptop. “Thank fuck.”

\---

“I think the Punisher’s probably good in bed, what do you think?” Matt said. He was stretched out on the sofa and tossing one of Foggy’s paperweights in the air. “Can you imagine him fucking you? I can.” Both Foggy and Matt himself. Oh, now that was an idea too. He would have said as much but Foggy’s heartbeat went spiky and upset. 

“Oh my god,” Foggy muttered. “Listen Matt. This is your friend Foggy talking, and Foggy cares about you,” he said earnestly, shoulders tight like he was steeling himself for a fight. “You’re saying a lot of stuff, and I think that you were in your right mind I think you’d be uncomfortable. Do you want me to gag you?”

Matt threw the paperweight again. “Not really into gags. Got handcuffs?”

Foggy turned on his heel and barricaded himself in the bedroom until morning. 

\---

“Coffee? Tea?” Foggy said, voice morning-rough. 

How did the saying go? Coffee, tea, me? “I’ll have you” Matt said, rubbing his eyes and holding up the jammie bottoms Foggy had lent him. 

“Huh?” Foggy smelled warm and like his bed, and Matt rounded the kitchen island to wrap his arms around Foggy’s waist. “The hell does that mean?”

“I dream about bringing you coffee in bed.” He hooked his chin over Foggy’s shoulder. 

Foggy tapped him on the forehead with a tablespoon. “About time,” he said. Matt could hear the grin. “I take milk and sugar.” He picked up his plate of toast and walked out of the kitchen.

Matt’s heart jumped and he got to work making a cup of coffee that would win Foggy’s heart, but when he sauntered into the bedroom in just his underwear and holding a tray with two mugs on it, Foggy was in the en suite, brushing his teeth and talking to Karen at the same time.

“Just put it on the nightstand, Matt,” Foggy said, garbled. 

“I thought we were going to have morning sex!” Matt whined. 

“I see the truth serum hasn’t given him a better sense of humour,” Karen voice came over the line tinnily. 

“You don’t even know the half of it,” Foggy sighed, and continued brushing like he was trying to stab himself in the brain. 

\---

“You’re ignoring me,” Matt said. 

Foggy looked up from his tablet. “I haven’t left your side in two days,” he said. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I love you, Foggy,” Matt said. It was the easiest thing in the world.

“I love you too?”

Matt put his face in his hands. “No, I mean I’m in love with you.”

Foggy shook his head. “Whatever, Matt.”

What the _hell_. 

\---

“Why don’t you believe me?” Matt demanded. “I’m on _truth serum_.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Foggy said tightly. 

“ _I_ want to talk about it. I love you. I love you so much. And I want to show you. Let me show you, please? Let me take you to bed, and let me wake up with you.” Matt’s voice was pleading, but he couldn’t stop it. “I want to marry you and grow old with you and—”

Foggy’s voice was severe. “Matt, stop. You’re making me uncomfortable.”

Matt’s teeth clicked together and he didn’t speak again, not even when Foggy said good night. 

\---

Matt woke up alone and hung over, in more ways than one. His head ached, but he levered himself up anyway. “I’m not Daredevil,” he lied out loud, and breathed a sigh of relief. He grabbed his phone. 

“Foggy, hey, it’s Matt.” He was sitting, slumped at Foggy’s kitchen island again, face practically pressed into the counter. “Look, it’s okay, we can just ignore all that stuff I said. It was just the serum twisting everything around anyway. I do love you, but you know I meant it…in the normal way, right? All that other stuff…about the other stuff…let’s just forget that happened.”

The drumbeat in his head made words difficult, but at least they were the ones he had control over now. 

“Thanks for putting me up. But I’m going to get out of your hair,” he said, finally, awkwardly. “Uh, thanks for everything.”

Every step on the road from Foggy’s apartment to his own lanced pain from the bottom of his foot to the top of his head, and maybe that’s why he didn’t notice someone sitting on his sofa until he pushed his own door open.

“What are you doing here?”

Foggy uncrossed his legs. Crossed them the other way. He was nervous. He held up the phone. “I got your message. Now I want you to tell me the truth.”

Sudden anger eclipsed the headache. “I was telling you nothing but the truth, but you wouldn’t listen.”

Foggy sighed and approached him, touched his cheek. Matt flinched. Foggy sighed again. “Matt,” he said. “I’m in love with you too.”

Matt felt his lip curl. He was in so much pain. “Whatever, Foggy,” he said meanly. 

“Stay put,” Foggy ordered, when Matt started to pull away. His voice dropped to a desperate, guileless whisper. “Matt, I love you.”

Foggy kissed him. It was just a soft touch of lips but it made Matt gasp and almost tackle them both down on to the sofa, so deep he fell into it. “Foggy,” he pleaded, “Foggy…”

“Say you love me,” Foggy ordered him again. 

“I love you. I love you,” Matt said intensely. “Say you believe me.”

“Yeah, yes.” Foggy pulled at Matt’s shirt, dragging him closer. 

“What changed?”

Foggy pushed back Matt’s disordered hair. “I don’t want the truth you have to tell. I want the truth you _choose_ to tell.” Matt’s throat clicked. That was not…a large number of truths. “It’s okay, Matt. I’ve met you,” Foggy continued, kissing reassurances onto Matt’s mouth. “Just don’t lie about loving me. Promise me that.”

Matt’s hands were all over Foggy—clutching his shoulders, stroking his cheek, stroking the shape of his waist and below. But inside, Matt was crossing himself, cutting his palm, raising his right hand, making the sign of every sworn oath he knew. “I swear it.”


End file.
